Alex was lamenting last week about the lack of visual cues for visited links on many sites (including, I admit, most of my own). While I agree that often visited link feedback is helpful, I also agree that in many cases it just adds more visual confusion and makes a site more difficult to make sense of at a glance, hurting its usability.

So why not have the best of both worlds? A clean, simple interface by default, but the capability to see which links have been visited on demand. Enter the Solution To Almost Everything, the bookmarklet.

I posted a comment to his entry containing a quickly hacked together bookmarklet that will dynamically change the style of all visited links to something recognizable. It only worked in Mozilla (or any other browser with proper standards support), and simply changed the color to red. But I played around with it some more after that, and decided that a more universal cue would be to make the visited links strike-through. I also got it working in MSIE by using some Microsoft proprietary extensions. Bleech. Damned Microsoft.

To use the bookmarklet, copy the following code (as a single line) into the Location field of a new bookmark: javascript: var styleText='text-decoration:line-through !important'; if(document.createStyleSheet) { /*MSIE proprietary:*/ var ss = document.createStyleSheet(); void(ss.addRule(':visited',styleText)); } else { /*W3C Standard:*/ var ss = document.createElement('style'); ss.setAttribute('type','text/css'); ss.appendChild(document.createTextNode(':visited {'+styleText+'}')); void(document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(ss));} or simply bookmark the following link: Strike Visited Links. (Try clicking that link for a quick demo.)