Timeline for Underline appearing for hyperlinks
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
24 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 21, 2022 at 6:10 | vote | accept | Arulkumar | ||
| Sep 22, 2018 at 1:07 | comment | added | Jeremy | I think this is a very good and valuable change that's a significant improvement to accessibility. Hold strong! | |
| Sep 2, 2018 at 22:09 | comment | added | E.P. | Here "classic" is just a euphemism for "the way things were done before we learned how to do them better", I take it? The nineties are gone. Let's not go back to their ugly design choices. | |
| Aug 20, 2018 at 18:48 | comment | added | Tim | I welcome the change, although this post makes a strong point against them. A partial solution could be to only show underlined hyperlinks, when the mouse hovers over a post (similar to what the Bitcoin Developer Reference does). This won't work for devices that don't have a pointing device. I'm also not sure how to identify intuitive hover areas for hyperlinks, that aren't part of a Q&A. | |
| Aug 20, 2018 at 15:50 | comment | added | Draco18s no longer trusts SE |
How about tags? You know our cute little [tag:] syntax magic? Here's one for you: bug. It does not look like a [tag].
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| Aug 20, 2018 at 2:22 | comment | added | LinkBerest - SO sold our work | @unor the default color is blue because it doesn't effect the two most common forms of color-blindness but w3w specs simply state a need for a high-contrast difference of 3:1 or more and underline. That page is also a good way to see why underlines are added (see the final form which shows complete color blindness). | |
| Aug 19, 2018 at 8:57 | comment | added | Bernhard Barker | @unor "Default" as in "the way most / all sites I use do it". I'm not really too concerned about what some spec no-one follows says. | |
| Aug 19, 2018 at 8:52 | comment | added | Shadow Wizard | I will not call it "ugly" to not offend those who did it, but I do see it as a very big step backwards, old fashioned design, and design which does not appear to be professional. All in my own opinion. This is very major design change, and the fact you just did it without asking for opinion first is also a big hit. (Not you personally! The management.) | |
| Aug 19, 2018 at 4:09 | comment | added | abarnert | "Many of our themes' primary colors don't deviate much from the text color itself." Maybe that's a sign that you need to design themes that offer a way to show contrast that's more visible? | |
| Aug 19, 2018 at 3:26 | comment | added | abarnert |
It looks pretty nice to me on most SE sites, but on Stack Overflow in particular, it's horrible. First, many people use lots of inline links in the middle of sentences to point you to reference docs that you probably don't need but might; the color made this the perfect amount of findable but unobtrusive, but the links make it looks hideous. Second, because even links in code_ticks are underlined, it obscures the proper names of functions in any languages that use snake_case instead of camelCase.
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| Aug 19, 2018 at 2:50 | comment | added | unor | @Dukeling: "Colouring is the default way to show that a link is a link." -- The default way was, and still is, blue color + underline. It’s defined like this in the CSS user agent style sheet (as recommended by the HTML 5.2 spec), and most browsers (as far as I know) style links like that, too. | |
| Aug 18, 2018 at 16:08 | comment | added | thesecretmaster | @AaronShekey Just wanted to thank you for responding promptly to this post and elsewhere. I don't love the change either, but it's great to hear back quickly about this being an intentional change and the reasoning behind it. | |
| Aug 18, 2018 at 12:58 | comment | added | Bernhard Barker | I'm still having trouble identifying what I can click on. Can we underline the other links as well? | |
| Aug 18, 2018 at 12:46 | comment | added | Bernhard Barker | Accessibility should be settings, not defaults. Colouring is the default way to show that a link is a link. If someone has difficulty differentiating that, they'll probably have difficulty everywhere, thus they'll probably have a browser extension, or know to start off customising site settings. | |
| Aug 18, 2018 at 1:46 | comment | added | dylnan | Can the underlines be turned off in the settings of an individual's account? People should be able to have a choice | |
| Aug 17, 2018 at 19:31 | comment | added | Aaron Shekey StaffMod | @ivan_pozdeev Some of the CSS that powers Stack Overflow is approaching 10 years old. I'm not saying CSS is legacy, I'm saying our CSS is legacy. | |
| Aug 17, 2018 at 19:30 | comment | added | ivan_pozdeev | Since when is CSS considered "legacy code"? Last time I checked, this was the standard (and only ) way to consistently apply styling in a Web page. | |
| Aug 17, 2018 at 17:56 | comment | added | Aaron Shekey StaffMod | We're supposed to have underlines for links in comments, just having fun with legacy CSS :) | |
| Aug 17, 2018 at 17:29 | comment | added | Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog | I don't see underlines for links in comments. | |
| Aug 17, 2018 at 17:24 | comment | added | Bhargav Rao | I guess I'm the weird guy, but I like the change. There are two clear advantages here that I can directly see. 1. It makes it clear for users who use night mode on phones. 2. It helps to catch spam in punctuation. | |
| Aug 17, 2018 at 17:20 | comment | added | Monica Cellio | A while back we asked for better contrast on Mi Yodeya meta and got underlines instead. They were initially a little jarring but I got used to them pretty quickly. Better contrast would still be better because it seems like the web is generally moving away from underlining links, but in the absence of better colors, I'd rather have underlining than nothing. (And frankly, given how much of the design world seems to think that super-light gray text on a white background is usable, I'm not sure we can rely on good color choices everywhere. Though we should still try.) | |
| Aug 17, 2018 at 15:45 | comment | added | HDE 226868 | I really appreciate the explanation, but I have to say, I find the underlines pretty distracting. Now my eyes go immediately to the link, instead of the sentence it's embedded in. Could we simply have better contrast with text colors? | |
| Aug 17, 2018 at 15:35 | comment | added | rene Mod | I honestly dislike this intentional change. It is ugly. | |
| Aug 17, 2018 at 14:54 | history | answered | Aaron ShekeyStaffMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
