Underline visibility (Re: Proposed Final Design for W3C Technical Reports style in 2016)

On Friday 30 October 2015 03:14:36 Coralie Mercier wrote:

> The final proposal from Elika is available:
>    http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/design/w3c-restyle/2016/
> 
> A sample document is also available:
>    http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/design/w3c-restyle/2016/sample

Some remarks on the hyperlink styling:

1) Neil Soiffer remarked[1] that it was hard to tell if a word was a 
link or not. And I must say I agree (after I switched off my user style 
sheet). The underline is a thin blue line that is nearly transparent. It 
should probably not be transparent.

2) The underline under CSS property names (<a class=property>) is lower 
than under other text (which is already quite low). There is a comment 
that says 0.1em extra padding was added on purpose to align the 
underline with other text, but it seems it aligns better without the 
padding.

3) The underline disappears completely when the font is small. On 
Opera 12, it is not even visible with my default font size. With that 
font size, the thickness of the underline has to be increased from 0.05 
to 0.09 em before the line is visible on all links. On Firefox, the 
underline only disappears with much smaller fonts, but the problem 
exists there, too.

It may be better to use a regular underline rather than a shadow, even 
if not all browsers can color such an underline yet.

4) There is no distinction between visited and unvisited links. I always 
find it useful that the computer remembers what I already clicked on, so 
I don't have to do that myself...

5) It is confusing that the space next to the ToC is active: There is a 
lot of empty space there and normally you can click on empty space to 
give a window the focus. But in this case the window unexpectedly 
changes when you click. There is highlighting on hover, but it is too 
subtle to serve as a warning.


[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-math/2015Nov/0008.html
    (member-only)



Bert
-- 
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