More Purple Links, Please

While browsing the Web, I always find it comforting to come across a page with purple links. Since the early days of the Web, purple has been the default colour for visited links. Here's a relevant note from the changelog of NCSA Mosaic 0.13 (1993):

Changed default anchor representations: blue and single solid underline for unvisited, dark purple and single dashed underline for visited.

When I visit a web page and see purple links, I immediately know that I have visited those links before. They indicate that I am familiar with some of the references the web page makes to other articles.

Although I'm quite fond of purple links, I know that not everyone shares this sentiment. Modern web design trends have moved away from this tradition, favouring sleek, minimalist aesthetics where visited and unvisisted links look nearly the same. While this can be visually appealing, in my opinion, it detracts from the experience of using the Web as a source of knowledge. When links look indistinguishable or unconventional, it can be hard to tell what I've already read, especially when I am revisiting a topic and want to easily spot the links that are new.

Now it is not hard to change the visited link style with a little userscript. For example the following userscript can override the website's stylesheet to colour visited links purple again:

// ==UserScript==
// @name Purple Links
// @match *://*/*
// ==/UserScript==
document.head.appendChild(document.createElement('style'))
document.head.lastElementChild.innerHTML = 'a:visited {color: #518}'

The above userscript should work well on most web pages with light backgrounds. But a simple solution like this won't look good on pages with dark or custom colour schemes. A more sophisticated solution is required to pick a visited-link colour that looks good on such colour schemes.

I find purple links quite useful because they clearly highlight the links I have already visited. I wish more websites would continue to honour this convention. So yes, more purple links, please.