Comments on: Been There, Done That

By: The Roaming Gnome

The Roaming Gnome — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 19:05:35 +0000

Thierry: the major issue with that code you have is that you aren’t following standards closely enough. I should warn you that Front Page is a corrupt and plauged peice of MS software, and you shouldn’t have to use some of those parameters you listed. They are very imaginative, but they may only work in IE, which is about as standards compliant as a potato…
For instruction on using CSS which will actually work: http://www.w3schools.com/css/
a {text-decoration:none;}
a:visited {text-decoration:none;}
a:hover {color:DarkGray; background-color:transparent; text-decoration:underline;}
I can’t think of a way to do what you ask using only an ‘a’ tag, but mabey someone else can. i stripped down the CSS you presented to a valid, working, readable CSS.
PS: Use Macromedia Dreamweaver to write CSS. and as proof to the uselessness of Frontpage, I Crashed my browser because the error page generated by the W3 XHTML Validator validating a FrontPage document.

By: Nick (dragotown)

Nick (dragotown) — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 20:07:09 +0000

That is something a lot of people think of as an afterthought. I am still looking for one I like for my site.

By: Thierry

Thierry — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 23:48:50 +0000

With my personal website I accidentally — and with some experimenting — found a subtle way to show (non-)visited links. New links (only) show underline when hovering over them. Visited links are not underlined.
I find this particularly handy when you have a lot of links on a page, or for menu’s, when color and layout stability are important.
I created it using FrontPage. My problem now is that I cannot recreate this with CSS.
I tried changing the order of the a:
hover {color:DarkGray; bgcolor:transparent; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single}
link {text-animation:none; text-decoration:none; text-underline:none; text-decoration:none; text-line-through:none;}
visited {text-animation:none; text-decoration:none; text-underline:none; text-decoration:none; text-line-through:none}
Can someone give me a clue? (http://users.telenet.be/hoornaert)

By: Dustin Diaz

Dustin Diaz — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 06:35:35 +0000

I too generally follow the nielsen approach. Except only modified to the extent of a different shade of blue and a different shade of purple. i would, however, like to move in a newer direction like collylogic with obvious checkboxes etc…
Funny about the collylogic site is that most of the blogroll is usually always checked as ‘been there’ – i’m sure most of us have the same experience when viewing the ‘big timers’ blogroll. I’m sure by now Dan is used to being listed with Shea, Molly, Zeldman, Bowman and the like. It’s very rare these days when go ‘ooo – simplebits, what’s that?’
Dan, your site is PermaVisited

By: Kenneth

Kenneth — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 04:08:41 +0000

I used to never use them, I always thought who needs them. Just recently I started applying them and I can now see how valuable they are for the user.
The technique I’ve been using is to simply remove the underline. Simple and effective.

By: Bob

Bob — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 22:51:37 +0000

For a commercial web site, where I assume it is desirable to have your visitors click each and every single link over and over unitl their credit card is maxed out, it seems that all links should be the same regardless of their state.
Personally, I take very little notice of the difference in link colors. I’ve always felt that I know where I’m going, where I’ve been, and whether or not I’d like to to go there again. In the end, it may just be a matter of style. Check marks, color change, decorations? Whatever. But does it look good?

By: masi

masi — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 09:09:05 +0000

when you have menu text links, say home, contact us, bla bla. Once visited , regardles of howyou change the color of visited link, on a next visit you want those visited links as active, in that case how do you do it?
say
active green
visited red
but on a new session ie, on next visit or on opening a new broweser you want the visited link to be seen as in active link color??

By: Terry Apodaca

Terry Apodaca — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 18:14:11 +0000

I also keep it simple with a visited link always a light gray. To me it is direct and to the point all in the color itself.

By: Christopher Hawkins

Christopher Hawkins — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 10:14:40 +0000

I keep it simple – if a link has been visited, it’s light gray.
Seems to be working out well so far.

By: Mikhail Bozgounov

Mikhail Bozgounov — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 16:23:08 +0000

I think, on a standard webpage (light background, dark text), best works to change links’ color to silver (or something in that gamma). Especially in pages with a lot of colors, silver/light gray is like saying to the visitor: “Hey, you’ve visited this link already, see how light and unnoticeable its color is!”…
…but all this is a matter of personal preference.
NOTE: Do you see the actual color or this comment? Well, something like this ;-)