Re: How bout types of colored links?

Well, here I go again:

In message <199505090713.BAA20417@nag.cs.colorado.edu>you write:
>One of the things I ran into in creating a teching tool recently was
>that I couldn't denote a particular thread.  I wanted to target the
>paper for multiple audiences and provide support for less technically-
>inclined audiences without compromising the flow of the paper.  It
>seemed logical to me to define a named type of link that has a particular
>color associated with it.  All the references to definitions could be
>in blue, the links to other elements of the discussion in red, and 
>purple would jump off my server to an off-site page.  All visited
>links could be tan if I felt like it.  There's currently a method in
>Netscape 1.1 to define different colors for visited and new links,
>as well as redefining the standard text color, but there's no way
>to have your own labelled links.  

No, No, No!  HTML should describe structure, not rendering.  The 
ability to describe different classes of links is an interesting idea, 
but how those classes are represented is a browser issue.

Something like 10 percent of males in the United States are at least 
pertially color blind; many of the rest of us have vision difficulties 
that are sensitive to the contrast between background and text colors.  
What you are proposing will make your links invisible to many people, 
and because they're described as "green links" rather than "definition 
links" you've made it difficult to configure our browsers so we can.

It is sad that the folks at Netscape have gone off in the direction 
they have, and even sadder that the market place is making them the 
definition of the standard rather than the standards.  But it's still 
the wrong thing.

--------
Sarr Blumson                     sarr@umich.edu
voice: +1 313 764 0253           FAX: +1 313 763 4434
CITI, University of Michigan     http://www.umich.edu/~sarr/
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Received on Tuesday, 9 May 1995 09:59:34 UTC