• One question already raised by the design systems team: should these interface elements be links in the first place? If they were buttons we would avoid the issue of :visited styling

Maybe not, but they keep coming up in designs year after year. I suspect enforcing this would be very difficult.

• What about global navigational links (for example the links in the main menu, e.g. Help, Donate, About Wikipedia, etc.)?

They link to pages which can be visited, so presumably should be styled as visited?

• What about table of contents links?

In general real hash fragments can be visited, meaning the URL with the fragment is in the user's history. If you think of "visited" as meaning "viewed that section" then the colouring is less useful, so there's an argument to disable in there, but note that fragment links can appear elsewhere in the interface and in user-generated content, so it would be difficult to change this consistently.

I'm not sure if there's a systematic way to approach this, or if we just have to file tasks one-by-one to fix them.

Likely will have to be fixed on a case-by-case basis.

reply (Talk page)

Fixed in T319013

view filters (History page)

These link to separate pages (search results) and as such it is argualby correctly to style them as "visited"

hide (TOC)

This are not rendered with <a> tags so are never given the visited link styling

edit (section headings)

These also link to a "separate" page, the edit page (although it isn't separate when using VE, but it does have a new URL), so again styling these is arguably correct.

This should be considered an epic as all the screenshots are of different features here and this is not specific to Vector 2022

thanks for your comments @Esanders

In T320798#8319245, @Esanders wrote:

edit (section headings)

These also link to a "separate" page, the edit page (although it isn't separate when using VE, but it does have a new URL), so again styling these is arguably correct.

two things that come to mind:

• I think it might be weird to style Edit source as visited and not Edit (which can appear next to each other in the section header)
• we don't style the Edit source link in the article toolbar as visited

Consider the "Using links and buttons" guidance when completing this task.

This ticket is in tracking for web team and following for DST. @ovasileva is this something we plan to work on? If not, is there another more appropriate team who could work on this?

These styles are sometimes helpful for me, in the cases 2 (« view filters (History page) ») and 4 (« edit (section headings) »). This way, when manually mass-editing (or inspecting, or whatever) a handful of pages, going back and forth, I have some clues of what I have already… visited.

One could also argue that these are indeed different pages, thus marking them as visited is completely relevant.

Basically, I agree with this comment above by Esanders.