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Just saw a blog post on the time line that said
> I've always made the :visited attribute for hyperlinks look the same as links that haven't been visited, and it seems that it's the default behaviour across the web.
?????
Am I misunderstanding something obvious?! The default behaviour, if you do not put any CSS to say otherwise, is to have links be light-blue and visited links be purple. Making them look the same so that people can't tell which links they already visited seems nasty and harmful and not the default...
The post says that they stopped doing that because they discovered that being able to tell which links you already visited is useful, so I'm not going to be mean in their replies, but I am extremely confused about what made them think it was a good idea in the first place
@vaporeon_ the only plausible reason i can think of to ever do that is that link color is trivially inspectable, so tracking code could easily purrofile you by getting an idea of what other webpages you might have visited, assuming you visit a lot of webpages using that tracker and don’t block it
i cannot verify that any advertisers are known to have actually done this, but like, it would be very easy to do
@aescling I would assume that you could also get the visited state of a link and not just its colour, am I wrong?
@vaporeon_ no, actually; browser vendors are aware enough to recognize there’s a big privacy hole if you’re allowed to do that
@aescling Hm, that's concerning... Does inspecting that require JavaScript?