211531 - Color of visited links should range from VLINK to LINK according to time passed

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, enhancement)

Description

[David Mediavilla]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; es-ES; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030313
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; es-ES; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030313

I'd like that the color of visited links could range from the the color defined
for visited links to the color of _un_visited links in proportion to the time
passed since last visit.

This feature was present in early Mosaic, but I haven't seen it again in any
browser.

It should be easy to code. The time of last visit is present in the History
(isn't it?). It should be a question of finding the time passed and dividing it
by the time we keep URL history. Then Mozilla should interpolate between visited
and unvisited colors. I am not sure if the interpolation should be lineal or
there would be some human factors to compensate.

I don't know why this is not the standard. Maybe there is some human interface
issue I didn't think about.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to a apge with links, some visited, some not.
2. The links unvisited would appear, say, red.
3. The links visited 1 minute ago would appear, say, yellow.
4. The links visited 7 days ago would appear orange.
5. The links visited 15 days ago would appear, say, almost red.

 

Actual Results:  
All the visited links within the history are yellow.

Expected Results:  
(See the steps)

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Note that this would be even slower than what we have now (which is just a
boolean "is visited" check and is a rather visible item in profiles of pages
with lots of links in them) and would require us to replace a pair of CSS rules
with a bunch of C++ code....

Comment 2

[Ross Shannon]

Having a graduated range of color values, while technically possible, is a
violation of basic laws of link coloring. It can be confusing enough when a site
sets unvisited links in green and visited ones in blue, without a range of
barely-discernable values in between to make sense of. If links are marked
visited longer than you'd like, set your history to remember items visited for
fewer days.

Comment 3

[Ross Shannon]

Resolving as WONTFIX.