Re: TECH: Re: Underlining

On 11.4.2007 Mark J. Reed wrote:
 > 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.
 >

Mark, you said what I felt, but failed to find clear words
for: I expect links in web pages to be underlined, and
underlined words to be links, quite apart from the
(dys)aesthetics of underlining in printed text, where I in
fact don't expect to see underlining at all! Now I also
understand why. Thanks!

As for different colors as semantic indicators I think they
should be secondary, as there still are some black and
white monitors out there, and always will be color blind
people. In fact I know a man who is color blind and just
because of that sets his monitor to b/w! In my new site
design the current page is shown in purple but not
underlined and not a link in the TOC shown no every page,
but that's hardly crucial.

Jim Henry wrote:
 > Normally I agree with you, but on a page like this where
 > almost every word is a link, the huge mass of underlining
 > seems a little distracting. Also, the underlining makes a
 > few of the characters with descenders hard to
 > read/distinguish. I think I might go with removing the
 > underlining but leaving the coloring, and adding some
 > comment at the top to say that links aren't underlined for
 > such and such reasons.

Yes, I see. In that case I'd probably use CSS to set a
background color, like light gray or light yellow, on
the links -- or the non-links, depending, as I'd
probably use a class on the <a> tags rather than apply
it to a [href] directly.

In a hurry...--

/BP 8^)
--
Benct Philip Jonsson
mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X!)
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"If a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,
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