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Programmer Humor @programming.dev

Pro @programming.dev

2w ago

Visited Link

16 comments

a bit of context:
I Still Know What You Visited Last Summer
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_selectors/Privacy_and_the_visited_selector
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/07/chrome_135_history_sniffing/
- For a long time this protection was so strict in firefox that even the dev tools was not allowed to see the :visited styles.
  
  I hate that, in the modern web, customizing is so important that websites want access to the link itself, instead of just stylizing the div outside like normal.
- TIL, thanks

For those who are curious about its history, this is where it all began for the visited links to be that color by default.
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 02:38:29 -0500
Subject: NCSA Mosaic 0.13 released.
Changed default anchor representations: blue and single solid underline for unvisited, dark purple and single dashed underline for visited.
- A dashed underline would make it a lot better and accessible. Don't think I've seen a browser do that by default

I like to style visited links blue and unvisited links purple, just to mess with people.

great example of a code smell, too! JS needs to know about styles?
shouldn't be styling in JS! make it asd/remove a class instead
need to know whether to load content or not? save it to local/session storage! don't make a server call if it already exists!
need to enhance your tracking? include it with your payloads as it happens, you're asking for race conditions
client side disabled local caching? great! working as intended. make a graceful fall-back
everything here is a short term problem that belies long term tech debt. tight coupling sounds sexy, but SOLID principals and The Law of Demeter exist to stop our codebases from rotting if we can't change it, then it's not software it's hardware
- JS needs to know about styles?
  It's about JS trying to detect if the link was visited, not about style. People used to do that to evade cross-site tracking protection, and this is why JS isn't allowed to know that anymore.
  
  This. Did a seminar on these techniques during my it security degree. Porn sites invented that to detect people that use competing sites.
  
  hence the comment about tracking ;) anything more than recording your events as they happen are a security and privacy risk
- great example of a code smell, too! JS needs to know about styles?
  shouldn't be styling in JS!
  But what if I want to use JSSS?

Sheesh, because of their colors at the bottom my mind interpreted purple and blue as purple and yellow and it got me hella confused

16 comments