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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Berkshire Hathaway's site is interesting. https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

That's weird, all the links are purple yet not in my browsing history...

I guess that shows why websites shouldn't mess with standard UX things, such as having unvisited links blue (or at least something other than the 'visited link purple' colour).

I'm not in on the joke... Why is there a Geico ad? With no affiliate parameters, even?

> GEICO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway that provides coverage for more than 24 million motor vehicles owned by more than 15 million policy holders as of 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEICO

Why would they need affiliate parameters?

Major Shareholder.

A week or two ago there was a discussion here about how genius this supposedly is, or how you shouldn't waste time to fix what isn't broken, etc.

I will take this moment to repeat that it would take less than a second to make those links blue instead of purple and the design would already be infinitely more usable.

Sometimes bad ux is bad.

>I will take this moment to repeat that it would take less than a second to make those links blue instead of purple and the design would already be infinitely more usable.

It seems they intentionally took a second to change the default behavior and make links purple. facepalm

Using this weird syntax I didn't know was legal: <body vlink="#ff0000" text="#000080" link="#800080" bgcolor="#ffffff">

Your comment just made feel really old. It took me a second to come to realize why you'd think that might be incorrect syntax. I had to read it 3 or 4 times to finally figure out why you thought there'd be a problem (there isn't one... if it's twenty years ago).

I see a problem. "#000080" is not a web safe color. Safer to go with "#000066" to support a wider range of monitors.

> Using this weird syntax I didn't know was legal: <body vlink="#ff0000" text="#000080" link="#800080" bgcolor="#ffffff">

They're deprecated attributes[1], but back in the 90s before CSS became meta, it was the norm.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.1

It sure would, but what's wrong with purple links? I am an occasional user of Berkshire's website (I read their letters and statements) and find it just fine.

Purple links are used in most websites for links that have been visited. On this site it's confusing as to whether you've visited these links or not.

A huge problem? Maybe not, but not a sign of 'good UX'

Maybe, purple links can make a new visitor think that they have visited this site before, so potentially it increases trust in the website and the company.

Thanks for "gaslighting" me, I guess.

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