Why Hyperlinks Are Blue (and Other Quirky Web Origin Stories) | Hacker News Reader

Why Hyperlinks Are Blue (and Other Quirky Web Origin Stories)

crazyegg.com

36 pointsprostoalex16 comments

This article is also a wonderfully accurate synecdoche of real life: there is no grand plan. There is no "right" way, even if society really tries to push it on us. What hit me the most when maturing into an adult is the tiny echo chambers that are created inside social circles: family, friends, colleagues, communities each draw very strong, thick lines around what is deemed possible, good, right. The biggest, and scariest, wake up call is that everyone is right, and everyone is wrong.

"everyone is right, and everyone is wrong" -- I know you didn't mean it literally as contradiction but probably expressing moral relativism - which could be a very difficult claim to support.

There certainly are objective 'right way' and grand plans of actions. As for the plans of action, they are almost never economical thus ignored.

The ARPANET. And even after ARPA became DARPA, it was still the ARPANET (or the net), except as a lame joke when the name changed.

And for the rest of the world: it's "the Internet (though it uses internet protocols). Like the Universe there is by definition one (though you can have little local internets).

Oh, and about my lawn: stay off!

"Red and green are the colors most affected by color-vision deficiency."

So maybe not the best choice for traffic lights. How did that happen?

It's probably a reason to continue maintaining a distinct position for each color in the traffic light.

There's one stretch of road in southern Quebec that has horizontal traffic lights that always throw me for a loop, despite not being colorblind. They flash in odd (to me) patterns and have two red lights: http://i.imgur.com/i7jCi.jpg

Two red lights... which are also square (other lights are still round). It's actually a pretty good design.

I'm good with the layout, but if I remember correctly the turn arrows flash in the middle while the outer red lights are still lit. So if I've got the green light to turn left, it's flashing in between two red lights, which I think is what made me kind of wary.

But how do you determine the position at night?

This is a decent explainer:

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/03/the-origin-o...

Red is associated with danger so it was stop. Go was original white. This causes problems because if the lens falls off, stop looks like go.

I guess blue is probably hard to make out in daytime against the sky, or if it's raining. Not a whole lot of colors left after that.

Also FTA: "So it made sense to choose a color that everyone could see and not mistake for black."

That's not how colorblindness works.

This is also not how it works: "Almost no one has a blue deficiency. Accordingly, nearly everyone can see blue, or, more accurately, almost everyone can distinguish blue as a color different from others."

People with "red-green colorblindness" usually have difficulty telling purple from blue.

> It affects 7% of men and only 0.4% of women, but that’s still one person in 13 overall.

No it's not.

Also: the percentage of men who can't tell highly-saturated red from highly-saturated green is way lower than 7%.

'It affects 7% of men and only 0.4% of women, but that’s still one person in 13 overall.

No it's not.'

It's not. It's more like one in 25. Thanks for catching that!

"More than any single person, Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for inventing the internet." Learn something every day.

"and it is the reason other parts of the web are blue – like Facebook, which is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind." didn't know that.

In its early years there was a quite popular Facebook 1:1 clone with the only difference being a red-color theme instead of blue. At one point FB even tried to buy it.

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