The humble hypertext link
Posted in Design on: Thursday, January 19, 2006 by Paul Boag
The ability to link one web page to another is so fundamental to the web that it is often overlooked as just too darn obvious. Amidst more exciting subjects like AJAX, accessibility or web 2.0 the humble hypertext link is often forgotten. Well, no more. I am here to make a stand, to campaign for the rights of this downtrodden tag.
accessibility checkpoint, its also plain polite! What is more this is a nice opportunity to jazz up those boring links in a useful way. Take for example the external links on this site. Each one has a nice little icon next to it indicating that it will open in a new window. Combined with the title tag that informs the user what is going to happen, this is a nice usability improvement.
Clearly show visited links
Okay, so I have moaned about some of the techniques people use to show a visited link. How would I do it better? For a start, I would keep the underline. I also normally change the colour to be nearer (although not the same) as the surrounding body text. This still ensures readability but the links blends in more with the other copy. Finally if I am feeling adventurous I add a little tick icon to the link in order to demonstrate that the page has been visited. Visit my entries archive to view an example of this in action.
Am I miserable old fart?
I know that I sound like a killjoy, intent on crushing any creativity in your design, but I think it is important to remember that our job is to improve usability not produce a piece of modern art. The majority of people using the web lack confidence. To them every time they go to a different site they are faced with a new and strange user interface. We have no right to undermine one of the few consistencies they have between sites… the humble hypertext link.
So what do you think? Have you seen bad implementations of body links? Am I being unfair in some of my criticisms? Post your comments here.
8 Comments
Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email
Concerning the underlinign of link, are you saying that this only applies to links that are in the content section of your site? Or to all links?
I’m new to web design, but I’ve found that link colors are often the most important and hovers as well. I find no matter what site I visit, blue hyperlinks with relatively different hover color (like orange) make for very clear hyperlinks even if the underline is taken away.
I do agree however that the underline seems to be the most important part of the hyperlink which is only something I’ve been discovering recently.
I think links in menu bars should be treated as a special case, so no I dont mean all links
I think I remember reading in “Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web” that Tim Berners-Lee considered the colours for links, and whether they should be underlined etc, and decided to go with blue anyway! He also got told by a lot of engineering type not to name his new invention something with such a long acronym (“www”), but he did anyway. It has survived for over 10 years despite that though!
No, I don’t think you are being “a killjoy”. Anyone who wants to mess with standards so people have to think about what to do at their sites is really killing-joy.
Aside from formatting issues with this “downtrodden tag”, there’s also the fact that you can’t use the “target=X” attribute anymore in XHTML… what are your thoughts on that? Personally, I use work-arounds in Javascript now to solve it, but this is quite a hassle, compared to the old-fashioned target=_blank… how do you deal with this?
re:target=X
I don’t mind not being able to use that. It whiffs of frames and new-window-openings anyway.
I use a javascript function to handle it. Basically any external links (the ones I want to open in a new browser window) I mark with a class=”externalLink”. I then have a function that cycles through all links looking for this class. When it finds it, it attaches an onclick which opens a new window.
When I’m surfing online for fun, I enjoy coming across web sites that don’t use underlines or go outside of the norm with links. It breaks up the monotony of web surfing.
I have to admit, it would be anoying to find important web sites, like government sites, trying to jazz up their links. I don’t want to have to figure out how the links work because I’m more interested in quickly finding information.