8
votes
On underlining links in prose
By default, no links are underlined in the Tildes interface, as far as I observed. I suggest that we underline the links that are in topic texts and comments. It is a nice visual clue in prose, and allows to distinguish between two consecutive links. Currently I'm using the following snippet in a userscript to achieve that:
// Underline links in prose.
document.querySelectorAll(".comment-text a, .topic-text-full a").forEach(
function (elem) { elem.style="text-decoration: underline;"; });
The rest of the links function like buttons, so it's not that important (or even unnecessary) that they be underlined. What do you think?
I personally agree with this. The underline used to be the universal indication of a link and I think that was useful.
It also helps distinguish links on mobile - my primary use of tildes - where I cannot hover to see if something is multiple links.
There's already a visual cue to indicate hyperlinks: they display as a different colour to the text around them. Obviously, we'd need to get some input from colour-blind people but, for most of us, that visual cue already exists.
Are you having trouble distinguishing the different colours used for hyperlinks?
I'm not colour blind, but I tend to not notice them, possibly some sort of conditioning. It's a problem especially when two links are adjacent to one another though, then sometimes you can't tell where the second one begins or even whether it's two different links instead of one w/o hovering on it with the mouse and checking the tooltip at the bottom of the window.
When I do that, an underline appears under each link separately. Does that not happen for you?
Yeah, it does. Absurd that I never noticed that up until now, thanks for pointing it out.
I still like it being evident without needing to hover though. But maybe it's a bit of a bikeshedding on my side?
What's "bikeshedding"?
Computer jargon for unproductive arguments over minutiae in a project. See: http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bikeshedding.html
Thanks!
I've added underlines to links inside text in topics and comments now, to try it out. It looks a bit weird to me right now, but I think it's mostly just because it's different and I'm not used to it yet.
I do think it's probably better overall from an accessibility perspective at least: even if someone has trouble distinguishing the link color from the normal text one, the presence of an underline lets them be able to see where links are (especially since there's no way for users to write underlined text with markdown).
Thanks a lot!
Links to groups (e.g. ~tildes) and tags (e.g. @nobody) aren't underlined right now, though normal links are – is that intentional?