Underlining (was: Re: Spicing up stylesheets)

[Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>]

Sorry I couldn't respond to this earlier Shaun.

On 11/02/2006, at 6:40 AM, Shaun McCance wrote:

> 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.

Absolutely. It was even common in earlier times, for people to  
double- and triple-underline words or phrases, resulting in a hand- 
written letter looking more like particularly messy music manuscript. ;)
> 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.

True. :(

The expectation that blue-underlined text will be a link is very  
strong by now: I realize it when occasionally I meet some blue- 
underlined text on a webpage, which is _not_ a link. Very disconcerting!

Our usual fix is to set CSS to indicate links by change of colour on  
mouse-over, also by applying bold style, so the distinction doesn't  
rest on colour alone (bearing in mind that some people are colour- 
blind: I also avoid red and green for that reason, those being very  
common colour-distinction issues for people partially colour-blind).
> 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.

It's a bit niggly, isn't it?
> 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?

That would be excellent. There might even be a way to link that to  
system language settings. We have to set up our system to handle our  
language anyway, so adding this element to that process makes sense.  
It could override browser-page link style, if desired.
> (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.

Absolutely. You end up with a very confused eye!

> And before anybody accuses
> me of being insensitive to accessibility needs, bear
> in mind that I'm color-blind.)

I know very little about colour-blindness, so I hope I got it right  
further up. Please advise if not.

Colour is used so much for distinguishing things and alerting people,  
including vital things like traffic lights in red and green, and stop  
signs and first aid signs in red, all of this keying into our  
immediate attention to anything in the coloụr of blood, but it's  
actively inconvenient, if not dangerous at times, for people who are  
colour-blind.

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm  
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN