- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 10:01:47 -0700
- To: Dave J Woolley <DJW@bts.co.uk>, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
At 12:24 PM +0100 7/19/00, Dave J Woolley wrote: > The problem is not whether or not links should be underlined > but whethe content provider should change the presentation of > links from that which the user expects. In combination with > non-standard link colours, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990502.html > points out that people are now relying on underlines > to recognize links (and being confused when they aren't links.) Unless there are already plenty of visual cues to indicate hypertext links -- and if the current crop of web users changes enough that people _aren't_ trained to read underlines as links. In "real life", people don't see underscores as something that will take them somewhere else. On my DVD player, I don't have underlines telling me which of the words on the screen will take me to the cut scenes. But I'm still able to figure out how to get there. Underlines are -not- sacred in any way; they only are really useful for _inline_ hypertext links, and frankly, those are less common and less useful on web pages. Maybe in theoretical hypertext, yeah, but in a practical sense, fewer pages are using anything that would require underscores. So we'll have a new generation of web users who are -not- trained to read underlined text as links! Which, in my opinion, will be a good thing, because it allows a useful type of punctuation to be "reclaimed" -- as it has been, you couldn't reasonably use underlines in your hypertext because people will confuse them with links. That's silly. -- -- Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com> http://www.kynn.com/
Received on Wednesday, 19 July 2000 13:03:27 UTC