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Comment by RedShift1 | Hacker News Reader

> The absolute first thing we did with CSS was use it to stop underlining links.

I don't know how this trend came to be. I fought it for as long as I could, links are underlined and when you hovered them the underline would go away to make it extra clear this is an interactive element. I considered it a staple of good design. Why did we remove the underline?

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Most sites invert that effect: hovering reveals the underline. The link is still distinguishable by color, still apparently interactive by hover effect, and preserves underlining as a styling option in the text, which is preferable.

I loved when I figured out I could get rid of the underline and add a dashed or dotted bottom border instead, it looked so cutting edge at the time.

In a word: print designers.

Traditional print designers started doing web design without investing the time to understand the important differences in the (new) paradigm.

Sadly, that root problem too often persists to today.

Agreed. I mean, the whole web page thing is literally a metaphor for people shuffling pages on their office desk.

I do web dev and I swear I have a better understanding of UX and design than 90% of the "web designers" I've worked with. I can't make pretty pictures, but I know an ugly experience when I'm building it ;)

That and the different colour for "visited" links. This site is a good example where a different colour for a link you've clicked would be really useful - but it's strangely lacking. Every time I click a link on HN to read an article, and come back to HN to read the comments discussing said article, I have to scan the whole HN page again to find the link. It's frustrating.

For me, followed links on HN are a lighter grey.

Remains the same colour for me on both Firefox and Safari.

I suppose you leave all your links blue as well?

No, they had an appropriate color, different from normal text.

Only if I haven't followed them yet.

Probably the same reason we started to like flat buttons?

Wait, some people actually like flat buttons?

Sarcastic or not, I really, really hate flat buttons. This is one area where I feel skeumorphic design works. Make it apparent I can push it. Today everything looks like a label, and good luck figuring out if it's active or not.

I think that's because the underline makes the text hard to read especially in badly designed fonts.

Because you could?

Or pick a 90's trope: Ironic detachment? Only things that are obscure are cool?

and in the a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active order generally too... or as I remembered them... love, hate.

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