As you may have noticed, this blog got a natty new theme last week. One of the things I wanted to do was make it hugely obvious which links have been followed. I therefore decided to style visited links with text-decoration: line-through. The thing is, this didn’t work. I was baffled, and so stood up, pointed to the sky and yelled: “TO THE GOOGLETRON!”

After my dog did his “what are you on?” face, I ended up finding Apple KB article HT4196, About the security content of Safari 5.0 and Safari 4. It says this:

WebKit

Impact: A maliciously crafted website may be able to determine which sites a user has visited

Description: A design issue exists in WebKit’s handling of the CSS :visited pseudo-class. A maliciously crafted website may be able to determine which sites a user has visited. This update limits the ability of web pages to style pages based on whether links are visited.

Further testing this morning regarding :visited suggests that the limits in WebKit are now severe. As far as I can tell, this is the list of properties now available to you when styling :visited in CSS:

• color

Great, huh? (Do leave a comment if you know of any others that work.) And with a good chunk of the world being colour-blind, what’s supposedly a fix for security is in reality also a punch in the face for accessibility.