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Why is it that italic and bold formatting is available while underline is not?

I guess it is voluntary, I'm just wondering why that would be the case.

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  • 17
    I've never missed the ability to underline stuff in two years.
    – Pekka
    Dec 23, 2011 at 21:13
  • 30
    Underlining has (still) connotations of a clickable hyperlink.
    – JJJ
    Dec 23, 2011 at 21:20
  • 2
    See meta.stackexchange.com/a/24142 for previous discussion on this
    – waiwai933
    Dec 23, 2011 at 22:39
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    In the three years that I have been on Stack Overflow, I never thought about using an underline. I have thought about using strikeout though.
    – Brad Gilbert
    Dec 24, 2011 at 6:50
  • 8
    @BradGilbert try <strike>
    – sq33G
    Dec 26, 2011 at 9:52
  • 3
    @sq33G I didn't say I couldn't use strikeout.
    – Brad Gilbert
    Dec 26, 2011 at 16:19
  • 2
    For those who might wonder about tag removal: this is a support question asking "Why", so a status tag does not really fit.
    – Shadow Wizard Says No More War
    May 12, 2014 at 9:14
  • 2
    Here's a post on User Experience about whether there is ever a need for underlining text when it's not a link - ux.stackexchange.com/questions/18086/…
    – JonW
    May 12, 2014 at 9:24
  • 3
    "I can't think of a legitimate use for this, therefore no one else has a legitimate use for it, either." — SE logic
    – endolith
    Jul 11, 2018 at 19:51
  • 1
    @sq33G You could also use <s>...</s> to strike out the ... text :P
    – Mr Pie
    Oct 20, 2018 at 12:55

3 Answers 3

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46

Underlining as a typographic means of emphasis is a relic of typewriters and handwriting. I'm not saying these two are dead (at least not both of them), but underlining is far inferior to bolding (for emphasizing and having it stand out from the rest of the text) and italicizing (for emphasizing but leaving the text's gray value intact, thus not standing out).

Using underlining for emphasis is only for when you have no other way. And we certainly do.

In addition, Juhana is right; on the web, underlining means "clickable".

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  • 12
    Because bolding and putting everything in italics makes everything look better.
    – casperOne
    Dec 24, 2011 at 16:38
  • 4
    On a side note: our very own UX.SE has an interesting question on allowing underline.
    – Jeroen
    Oct 22, 2012 at 11:52
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    Bold is better than u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e̲.
    – John Militer
    Jul 4, 2017 at 23:14
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    For me hyperlinks on a web were always distinguishable by color difference and not by underlining. On the other hand, I was never used to using bold for emphasis, because for me its purpose is for headers and it attracts too much attention compared to u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲i̲n̲g̲. U̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲i̲n̲g̲ is something in between bold and italic.
    – EvgenKo423
    Jul 28, 2019 at 9:02
  • Underlines damage legibility of letters with descenders (çgjpqy). @casperOne, are you one of those vandals who underline whole paragraphs of a book?
    – Anton Sherwood
    Nov 25, 2019 at 19:03
  • @EvgenKo423, to my eye, your underlines here stand out much more than the alternatives.
    – Anton Sherwood
    Nov 25, 2019 at 19:03
  • I use italics for emphasis, and bold for important things. Underlines have no added semantic value in the context of Markdown on Stack Exchange.
    – Sebastian Simon
    Apr 12, 2020 at 20:46
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You can u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e̲ t̲e̲x̲t̲ by using the unicode combining character U+0332:

u&#x332;n&#x332;d&#x332;e&#x332;r&#x332;l&#x332;i&#x332;n&#x332;e&#x332;d&#x332;

Use this bookmarklet to underline the selected text in the active input control:

javascript:(function(){var el=document.activeElement,$el=$(el),start=el.selectionStart,end=el.selectionEnd,val=$el.val(),text=val.substring(start,end).replace(/\S/g,"$&\u0332");$el.val(val.substring(0,start)+text+val.substring(end));el.selectionStart=start;el.selectionEnd=start+text.length})();void 0;
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  • 8
    Looks like this on Chrome 16, Ubuntu 11.10. Yuck!
    – hammar
    Feb 3, 2012 at 2:35
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    Well, ya.. Not great, but perhaps better than nothing. On WP7 the line is solid at least, but offset by half a character to the right. I'd post a screenshot, but WP7 still lacks that capability.
    – gilly3
    Feb 3, 2012 at 4:50
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    +1 for being very evil with your use of what is available.
    – Donal Fellows
    Feb 3, 2012 at 16:03
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    For spacing, use &nbsp; instead of normal spaces. Trying to combine normal spaces with &#x332; will give you odd and ugly results.
    – Pacerier
    Nov 6, 2015 at 6:33
  • 3
    Sometimes nothing is better than something.
    – SevenSidedDie
    Jun 9, 2016 at 18:33
26

On the web, an underline denotes a clickable link.

We do not and should not encourage contributors to create confusion by underlining regular text.

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  • 8
    Very few of the links on SO are underlined. I'm not sure this would create legitimate confusion.
    – Charles
    Dec 24, 2011 at 3:25
  • 6
    @Charles: That's a design choice - one that many might disagree with but that's beside the point. The underline indicates a hyperlink, period; it doesn't matter whether or not the real hyperlinks are underlined, underlined text on the site is going to signal to readers that there is a hyperlink when there actually isn't.
    – Aarobot
    Dec 24, 2011 at 18:24

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