Browsers render textlinks blue by default. Jeffrey Zeldman wrote an article stating Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, reached it at random:
http://alistapart.com/blog/post/why-are-links-blue

I can't find any information on why visited links are purple. It does however seems logical to me to choose a color close to the link color, preferably one colorblind people can distinct too.  

Why do read links turn purple?
I know Emacs tries to be intellectual and opens its helper buffers depending on which dimension of the window is bigger, so it may appear in vertical split window if current width is bigger than height, and in horizontal split otherwise.

But I’d prefer it to open that list always in horizontal split, because there are long paths I can’t see when the buffer is placed in vertical split. How can I do this?
