Re: Spicing up stylesheets

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-02-10 at 15:35 +1030, Clytie Siddall wrote:
> On 09/02/2006, at 8:16 AM, Matthew East wrote (in introduction):
> 
> > I've been looking at the possibility of spicing up the yelp look a  
> > bit. I've
> > only done a bit of brief experimentation, I thought I'd ask first  
> > and see if
> > this is something you'd be interested in doing for stock yelp.
> 
> This reminds me of a query I should have made some time ago...
> 
> Underlined links in Vietnamese are actually confusing: we use a  
> system of diacritics to distinguish meaning, and one of those  
> diacritics is a dot under the vowel. Underlined text obscures that  
> dot, thus leaving the user trying to guess the meaning of the word.
> 
> Is Yelp currently capable of turning off link decoration, for  
> example? If so, is this easily done, from a menu or Prefs?

Underlining isn't a very nice thing to do to your text,
regardless of what language you're reading.  The whole
underlining concept comes from hand-written documents,
where font style and weight changes are hard to do.

But somehow, somebody thought it would be a good idea
to mark hyperlinks with underlines, seriously hurting
readability.  It's become such an accepted idiom that
you create a discoverability problem if you don't use
underlines.

We could, I suppose, add an option to Yelp for whether
or not to underline links.  Even though I know I'd turn
off underlines if that option existed, I just hate to 
put that sort of thing in the preferences dialog.

Perhaps we could do a per-language setting.  We'd leave
underlines on for languages where underlining is merely
bad, and turn them off for languages where it's downright
evil.  Would that be an acceptable solution?

(Side note: I'm of the opinion that color change alone
is sufficient to make links discoverable, but only if
text color isn't changed throughout the document for
all sorts of other stuff.  And before anybody accuses
me of being insensitive to accessibility needs, bear
in mind that I'm color-blind.)

--
Shaun