Link colours and underlining
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November 22, 1997 | ||||||||
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Dear Lost What you describe is, happily, a rare situation. Yes, the links you have visited are supposed to be purple, and the ones you haven't visited are supposed to be blue. Both are supposed to be underlined. This is a convention that almost every web page designer and creator follows.
Imagine you are driving in a strange city,
and all the traffic lights look like this:
Disorienting, isn't it? Wouldn't you hesitate just a wee bit before going through an intersection? (This is not to say that navigating web links is as potentially dangerous as driving through intersections, oh my gosh no.)
Aunt Netty suggests not overriding link colours. Sometimes underlining can be misleading, too. Which of the following links have you been to: this one, this one, or this one? Right. None of them. They're not links, just underlined text. Aunt Netty apologizes for purposefully colouring those examples, and suggests using bold or italic for emphasis, not underlining, because people might think it's a link. When you're testing your pages (as you always do), and you find that your link conventions have somehow changed, check the BODY tag -- perhaps your web page editor (Frontpage, Navigator, whatever you're using) has done it without your knowing. The BODY tag should not look like this: <BODY LINK="#000080" VLINK="#000080" ALINK="#FF0000">In this example, both unvisited links (LINK) and visited links (VLINK) are going to be displayed in the same colour, and a site visitor won't be able to see which pages he or she has been to. By the way, the active link colour (ALINK) can change the colour of a link while the mouse is over it, as in example above, to reinforce the idea that it's a link -- so it should be a different colour as the other link colours, as in example above.
If you must override link conventions,
please do it consistently and elegantly.
For a good example, see
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
All links throughout this site use
different colours and are not underlined, but they do have a
different active link colour.
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What's so special about conventional traffic lights?
Most people do not have to spend any time
figuring them out all over again.