We should be using javascript to mark a link as visited

[WardCunningham]

We render internal links as anchor tags that is only used if javascript is disabled. However, depending on how one might visit pages these anchor hrefs can be marked as visited and thus show as a different color, usually purple instead of blue.

We also manipulate the browser's url to construct our lineup version. This interferes with the browser's understanding of visited because it never sees the html version when we perform the linking in javascript. This stackoverflow answer suggests that we could coax the browser to understand that we are in fact visiting pages.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/795654/using-javascript-to-mark-a-link-as-visited

[paul90]

I'm really not sure about this.

Currently it looks as if we get visited links by opening the page using the URL in the wiki page footer. This really only marks a particular URL to the page as visited. So for example if I visit Follow Links ('http://fed.wiki.org/follow-links.html') from the "How To Wiki" page I will get Follow Links marked as visited when I am visiting the fed.wiki.org wiki, but not on the How To Wiki wiki page when viewed on any other wiki.

Using history.replaceState looks attractive, but with the links as now it will just make wiki pages as visited in the context of the current wiki. So, has the potential to cause confusion.

It might be better to change the css so that all links get the same style.

Something also to consider is that the site that is included in the link title (tooltip) is not always where the site that the link will lead to when clicked.

[WardCunningham]

Well, uniform rendering via css would be a much simpler solution. I've gotten use to links almost always rendering the same way so they seem to go missing when they are occasionally shown as visited.