Re: TECH: Re: Underlining

Henrik wrote:
<<
I don't!  I do not like underlined links at all, because they destroy
the visual purity of the text.  If you have many links, your text
become more and more ugly.  And it is the web designer's duty to
prevent people from seeing ugly text. :-P
 >>

I'm glad someone spoke up in favor of non-underlined links!
Underlining is important, and shouldn't be relegated merely to
links.  Consider that the difference between bold and non-bolded
text is often difficult to distinguish (at least to me).  I don't
consider
it different enough from ordinary text to use.  Also consider that
many of us (including me) have unicode fonts that don't have
italic options.  This means if you wanted to use a theta for [T] in
a transcription system for one of your languages, and you wanted
to put it in italics, it'd look like this:

"sena"-theta-"ilan"

Where everything but the theta is in italics.  ARGGH!!!

The only reliable text-setter-offer is the underline (or the overline,
I suppose).  And even if you go to the trouble to devise a
romanization system for your language that *does* italicize
correctly, what do you do if you want to show an example of
your language, and highlight a specific portion of your example?
I refuse to put everything in quotes--especially when the English
translation is going to go in quotes, as well!  For these situations,
I *always* use an underline in conjunction with italics, as with
this page:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/kamakawi/adjectives.html

But I also echo this sentiment:

Henrik:
<<
But it's nice that there are user preferences overriding what web
designers think. :-)
 >>

Which is the whole reason I put in that black and white option
for my webpages (replete with traditionally underlined links).

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

Replies