Visited links

[snakeling]

Hi! I'm trying to work out what the best way to indicate visited links would be, as per bug #1386.

This is the situation right now:

Tropospherical red/purple

• links are red/purple with an underline
• hover/focus is indicated with a different colour
• visited links aren't distinguished at all

Celerity

• links are greenish with an underline
• on hover/focus, the underline disappear
• visited links are a darker colour

Lynx

• links are blue with an underline
• there is nothing to indicate hover/focus
• visited links are purple

This means that ideally, hover/focus should be indicated on Tropospherical, as well as on Lynx; and that visited links should be indicated on Tropospherical, and maybe made more visible on Celerity.

I'm personally against using bold/normal contrast, especially to indicate hover/focus, as I dislike it immensely when the words on the screen have to rearrange themselves to make room for newly bolded words. I can't imagine I'm the only one on that.

Moreover, most links on DW are unbolded, but usernames are always bolded, which means it could get very confusing very quickly.

Other possible means of indicating visited links in particular would be the use of overlines or outlines, but it's problematic as it's not an established convention.

Of course, there's always the trick of making visited links another colour, but this excludes a lot of people with vision problems.

For testing's sake:

• Tropo Red: normal link -- hover link -- proposed visited link
• Tropo Purple: normal link -- hover link -- proposed visited link
• Celerity: normal link -- hover link -- visited link -- proposed darker visited link

So, mostly, I'd like to have other people's opinions :) What do you think?

Comments

[zvi]

Unless I'm missing something, all you have to do to allow people their defaults is not provide color specifications. Then the browser defaults will apply, so the blue/red/purple on white if they haven't changed them, and whatever they selected if they have changed their defaults.

[jesse_the_k]

Umm, d'oh!