By this I mean assigning the exact same color to both visited and unvisited links (a:link and a:visited in CSS), for an entire Web site. Jakob Nielsen has frequently railed against the practice; Eric S. Raymond has commented that people who do it "should be killed". I've been inclined to agree. But it's been vaguely ominous to see the rapidly increasing number of Web sites that indulge unashamedly in merged link colors -- not just artsy-fartsy personal pages, mind you, but sites that thousands of people use every day. Netflix, for example. Such sites make me wonder: is the visited/unvisited distinction on its way out? I'd have assumed this would be like removing the yellow from traffic lights, but apparently a lot of "designers" feel differently. Their philosophy seems to be that, above all, a site should look "clean" and "pure", while usability is a secondary consideration. In other words, it's more important to appear easy to use, than to actually be easy to use.

Well, then: Are they right? What do you think?

Excellent Introduction to Philosophy

Sally Haslanger's Problems of Philosophy (part of MIT OpenCourseWare) is a real gem, despite being presented as screwily-formatted PDF.