Re: TECH: Re: Underlining

I prefer  underlined links precisely because I read a lot of blogs
that feature adjacent ones;  it's a convenient shortcut for not
interrupting the flow of the text.  Language Log does this all the
time, for instance:

"This is a topic that has come up [many] [times] [before] here on
Language Log..."

where those three words are links to three different past articles on
whatever the current subject is.  Without underlines it looks like one
link instead of three.

But that's just one example of a more fundamental fact that web
authors tend to forget: web pages aren't just documents; they're a
user interface.  As such, human factors in UI design apply, and
aesthetics (and traditional typesetting practice) must take a
backseat.  Most users expect links to be underlined and blue (or
purple if already visited), and while you can mess with the specific
colors to match your page's color scheme, keeping the same contrasts
is important.  By the same token, they expect underlined text to be a
link, and get frustrated when it's not. This means that underlining is
otherwise pretty much unusable in web pages, which is annoying, but
being annoying doesn't make it false.

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