Multiple Links in Post to Same Destination All Show Visited if Just 1 Clicked

[coops]

Perhaps this is just my mis-understanding of how the 'visited' function works with links in a post, but I have not come across this before and in my testing today found a number of style sheets actually disguise the problem.

I also have struggled to find an answer in the vastness of the web's infinite knowledge.

In a blog post I have included 3 outbound links. For this example lets say 2 of those links go to the same destination URL and the 3rd to a different URL.

When the post is published and I click on the first of the links to the same destination URL, the anchor text color changes to whatever the style.css indicates for a:visited, as it should.

What I have noticed however is that the 2nd link to the same destination now also changes to the a:visited color, even though I did not click on that specific link.

I also wrote a second post and included a link to the same destination URL as one of the links in the first post, and even though I have not clicked on the link in the second post, it's color was also turned to a a:visited color.

Just to make sure I tried it in a different browser (was using Chrome 8.0) and tested in Firefox 4.0 beta 9.

Same scenario, all links to the same destination URL came up a visited color even though I have not clicked on any link in the Firefox browser view of the posts.

Confused why I had not experienced this before I checked in Executive theme and found (at least in my version) the unvisited (ie not clicked) and "visited" link colors are set the same in the style.css file (both to blue).

So the issue would never be apparent in that theme as the link color is always blue whether clicked or not.

This behavior suggests that the test for a "visited" link is not actually whether someone clicked on the link (anchor text), but in fact if the destination URL has been visited.

Sort of makes sense, but the naming convention and, at least my conventional thought, has always suggested clicking the link changes the color.

Is this assumption correct and am I seeing, in the undisguised example, the correct link behavior ???

Appreciate any feedback to straighten out my view of conventional thought.