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Why are hyperlinks blue?
- SubiculumCode 5y agoWell, for the most part, they aren't anymore. Blue, I mean.
- onychomys 5y agoOne thing that's always bugged me about the HN interface is that visited links are basically the same color as the metadata below them. Makes it hard to just glance at a screen and see the stories you've already clicked on.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoNo, visited links are grey. That's the default. I've seen "new" stories appear that are grey links because they were popular weeks earlier and I had already read them. Maybe reset your defaults?
- grawprog 5y agoThe metadata below stories are also grey. I think that was the GP comment's point. Both visited links and metadata are grey.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoOh, I see, I misunderstood. Thanks!
- blibble 5y agothere's a special place in hell for people that remove the underline from hyperlinks
- DonHopkins 5y agoThere is also a level of hell where reified retired 3D company logos swoop around booming out thumping techno trade show floor music, spinning, bowing, and pirouetting around with each other. Somewhere the old SUN and SGI and DIGITAL are still dancing.
- alex_young 5y agoHmm. I don't see any discussion here, but weren't BBS links typically blue? I think I remember that being a thing, and that was well before 1993... Also, cyan is a much better color for text on a black background. Dark blue is almost invisible. This makes some of the early examples a little complicated since we moved to white backgrounds around the same time as the web came to fruition.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoIt was working as designed. If you already visited that page, you don't need to go there again. Time was precious on dial-uo connections, better go visit some new page instead!
- kps 5y ago> we moved to white backgrounds around the same time as the web came to fruition ‘We’? Document-oriented workstations, including the one WWW was developed on, routinely used black-on-white back to the Alto, or NLS. (CAD stayed white-on-black due to the history of vector displays.)
- reaperducer 5y agoIn my BBS days (I ran a node of ARB Net), BBSes were black background by default with white text. "Links" were just key presses. Press [SPACE] for next screen, or as it was commonly known, "Spank the blank." [G] for the document repository. Or as it was commonly called "G-Philes."
- egypturnash 5y agoNot "G-Philez"?
- reaperducer 5y agoARB wasn't that hip. That was for C-Net people!
- xyzzy21 5y agoObviously. Who didn't know this? At least who was alive and using the web back then :-)
- onion2k 5y agoMosaic was the first browser I used, and the first I wrote websites for (I still only test in one browser ;) ). Something the article doesn't touch on is the fact that there wasn't really such a thing as hex colors like "#0000ff" back then. You could use them, but no one did because they weren't guaranteed to work properly. There was a list of 256 "web safe colors" that you could use that were the 8 bit palette that most computers supported in VGA graphics (at 640x480 resolution), and then a further list of HTML colors that could be used if the user had a graphics card that could use 16 bit SVGA graphics. Using 24 bit hex code colors didn't come along until a little later, when computers were likely to display them properly. In other words, links weren't #0000ff. They were "blue".
- bitwize 5y agoYes, people did use the hex codes back then. You just had to take care that the ones you used were on the list of 216 (not 256) web safe colors. The VGA palette was programmable and supported up to 262,144 colors, but a standard set of 216 was used in browsers to allow Windows, Mac OS, and other programs color table slots with which to draw their standard colors. I think some browsers understood X11 color names like "blue" or "DarkSlateGray", but there are more than 216 of those, so same caveat applies.
- geophile 5y agoThe ASCII color codes for a terminal are in a 6x6x6 space. That’s 216. Does that explain the number of web-safe colors?
- bitwize 5y agoThe same space is used for the web colors, but I don't know if there's a causal connection there.
- duskwuff 5y agoNo. 256-color mode wasn't added to XTerm until July 1999: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_111 https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_111
- bityard 5y agoMan what a weirdly speculative article. Is this what Mozilla employees are being paid to do these days? It's basically a tour of old hyperlink and windowing systems... with lots of guessing and maybes. I'm not sure why it's relevant that Win 3.1 had blue titlebars, for instance. The author never actually answers her question but I imagine the obvious guess is the correct one: Black text on a white background was the predominant GUI style at the time (probably due to Mac OS and Windows) and the software designers needed a visual cue that the hyperlink was clickable. Just underlined wouldn't have worked because underline was already a popular style in text processing. So they decided to give it a different color too. Blue is the most logical choice as it has good contrast against a white background, and has a neutral meaning (compared to say, red). There weren't really a lot of color choices back then, the largest palette you could count on at the time was 16 colors. This was what Mosaic did and most browsers that came after it (including the most influential: Netscape) did what Mosaic did. And there certainly were browsers of the era that didn't use blue underline for links, the next most common paradigm was some kind of bordered box around the text (usually the same color as the text).
- not2b 5y agoMosaic and Netscape didn't do black text on a white background. The default background was gray.
- andy_ppp 5y ago“Black text on a white background was the predominant GUI style at the time (probably due to Mac OS and Windows) and the software designers needed a visual cue that the hyperlink was clickable.” For a comment complaining about unsubstantiated speculation this struck me as exactly that…
- wahern 5y agoThe default background was gray for Netscape, even on Windows, presumably because that was the default background for common Unix toolkits like Motif/X. Even Internet Explorer defaulted to gray. See these Wikipedia articles containing screenshots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator In particular, notice the IE2 screenshot, which shows it displaying the more modern Wikipedia website using a gray background. IE2 doesn't understand CSS, so just displays the source. The CSS declares a white background, so we can infer that the HTML probably does not declare a gray background using the long forgotten BODY tag BGCOLOR attribute. (Rather, almost certainly the HTML doesn't use the BGCOLOR attribute at all.) It's possible that Mosaic defaulted to white on Mac OS, but I doubt it. Netscape didn't back then, IIRC. For a long time gray and gray-toned backgrounds were ubiquitous on the web. It was nice because white backgrounds are difficult on the eyes, especially for prolonged periods. Unfortunately, white eventually began to dominate, as it already did for most Windows and Mac applications. Now we're coming full circle with dark theming, though dark theming is typically much darker than the old web and old X applications.
- billyhoffman 5y agoI'm a little surprised by some basic facts the article gets wrong. - WorldWideWeb was not created in 1987. Tim Berners-Lee released it in December 1990, based on a proposal he developed in 1989 [1]. - Windows 1.0 in 1985 did not have hyperlinks. It also did not have overlapping windows. [2] That second screenshot is of Windows 2, (from December 1987) showing the "Help" system, which did use underlined hyperlinks, from 1989. It makes me question the thoroughness of their research at all. > What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one knows, but I have some theories. ... I like to imagine that Cello and Mosaic were both inspired by the same trends happening in user interface design at the time. My theory is that Windows 3.1 had just come out. What? No! These are grad students working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the 1990s on big powerful Unix workstations [3]. I highly doubt the UI choices of Window 3 were relevant or closely watched by that team. 1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#Career_and_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#Career_and_res... 2- https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-3-a-pair-of-strike-outs/ https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-3-a-pair-o... 3- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)#History
- setpatchaddress 5y ago“ Gopher Protocol was created at the University of Minnesota for searching and retrieving documents. Its original design featured green text on a black background.” Yeah. All you need to know about this article.
- nsxwolf 5y agoGosh I could have sworn I remember it being amber text on a black background.
- daveslash 5y agoYeah, I think the point that @setpatchaddress was trying to make was that the author is confusing the color of the monitor itself with the color prescribed by the software. Thus, take the accuracy of the entire article with a big grain of salt. That's how I understood the comment.... Monochrome monitors were often either green or amber or white. If the monitor used P1 Phosphor, then it was green, P3 Phosphor was amber, and P4 Phosphor was white. So the color of the text on the screen was a reflection of the hardware spec/design, not of the software.
- not2b 5y agoThe answer is "Mosaic", even if someone can find some other earlier use of blue. They chose it, and Netscape kept it, which meant that everyone was trained to expect it.
- irrational 5y agoI first used the WWW in 1995 (after seeing a fellow student in a computer lab looking at sports scores in a browser and asking him what he was looking at) and, of course, it used blue for links at that time. That fact that it took this article, 26 years after I first saw the WWW and 25 years after I built my first web page, to question why hyperlinks are blue makes me laugh. What else have I never questioned because it was always that way?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ssdspoimdsjvv 5y agoOnly ~33% of my 27", 1440p display is used for this article, which makes the images very unclear unless I zoom in, since they don't get their own paragraph and the text wraps around them. Not sure if this qualifies as irony for a blog article on UX.
- incanus77 5y agoSurprised this doesn’t mention visited links turning purple to mark that you had been there. I remember coding link, alink (active link during click), and vlink attributes.
- basch 5y agoAre those dates right? WWW in 1987? That's like 3 years earlier than I thought it was.
- rickstanley 5y agoIt was released in December 1990. As pointed out by billyhoffman in the comments, there are some factual errors.
- basch 5y agoI saw that after the page reloaded. When you load a page and somebody comments, it doesnt inline load.
- jacquesm 5y agoNo.
- mattl 5y agoHyperTIES in 1988 had blue hyperlinks. http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/ http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/
- LorenPechtel 5y agoThey're blue because they're sad you're leaving their website! :)
- barbazoo 5y agoEven though some facts might be wrong as others have pointed out, I just love reading about the history of the internet on a higher level and how it came about. I wish I could have been involved in that in its early stages. Truly transformative.
- blibble 5y agothere was a short period of time in Windows 95 (I think with the shell update) where everything became a blue hyperlink including the shortcuts on your desktop (which now functioned with a single click) it was awful
- dredmorbius 5y agoProbably Win98, the "Internet integrated into Windows" version. (DoJ had some thoughts on that.)
- mattl 5y agoIt was also available for Windows 95 too as an IE “upgrade”
- gjvc 5y agodunno, but I wish we'd started out with all browser default CSS looking like twitter bootstrap 2.3.2 rather than the bevelled tables and clunky buttons there were, and which took ages to shake.
- egypturnash 5y agoEverything looked like that, those clunky bevels fit right in with the operating systems of the time.
- timw4mail 5y agoI'm rather fond of buttons that look like buttons, rather than colored rectangles or buttons that look like links, because they have affordances to what they can do. Bootstrap is a good tool for CSS, but I think it also over-legitimzed restyling and reinventing native HTML interactive elements.
- tudorw 5y agoblue because it stands out, red means stop, green means go, yellow and orange you cannot read.
- js2 5y agoAccording to Starman, yellow means go very fast: https://youtu.be/g3WtvzmKCQQ https://youtu.be/g3WtvzmKCQQ (Starman learns much like ML apparently.)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 101008 5y agoI miss blue for links and purple for visited links. I think Google still does it (which is great for the nostalgic of the webs), but today links are mostly buttons/images and not text anymore. I remember also, in the 90s, was quite popular yellow text against a black/dark blue background. The old days!
- timw4mail 5y agoThe fact that the :visited state of links was gimped due to privacy issues doesn't help much either. It used to be any visited link would look visited, regardless of the website. This made it possible to see where a user had visited across the web, and so visited links only apply to the current origin now. At some point it also became hip to remove the underline from links, and links rarely have underlines anymore.
- dredmorbius 5y agoAny deets on the privacy aspect? I'm assuming a JS query can check link status and colour? With a targeted or crafted link-of-interest, user activity might then be tracked, yes?
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoRight.
- gumby 5y agoApparently the author has never used a monochrome interface if they think gopher is “green” and Linux (which has nothing to do with hyperlinks either) is “white”
- thibran 5y agoI would love if links to the same domain would have another color, so that you know if e.g. a news site just links to own content or the source, without clicking all the links in the articel.
- rhplus 5y agoQuick answer: "Because blue is neither red nor green".
- dystroy 5y agoSo, is there somebody there who knows Marc Andreessen or Eric Bina and could aks one of them to confirm they choose blue because it looked good on white while red or green were obviously too much loaded ? This looks simpler than listing a bunch of other UI, many non influential and none of them giving the answer.
- jccalhoun 5y agoAgreed. I'm kind of shocked that the author didn't just ask people who were on the mosaic team.
- Veen 5y agoPerhaps I'm being unfair, but that's what a journalist would do, not a UI designer writing what is essentially a piece of content marketing.
- vitaflo 5y ago> they choose blue because it looked good on white Websites back then did not have white backgrounds, they were all gray. In fact I’ve always wondered why the default background was gray more than why the links were blue.
- pornel 5y agoBecause window backgrounds were gray in NeXT, because buttons used both white and black to create beveled "3d" borders, because beveled buttons were a fancy upgrade compared to simple borders in 1-bit graphics. Screen resolutions and drawing speed weren't good enough to waste on thicker borders, so 1px lines had to stand out on their own.
- Stratoscope 5y agoBack then, most people used CRT displays, and just like today, tended to have the brightness turned up too high. And it was fairly common to have a 30 Hz refresh rate. The refresh might even be interlaced! A white background in this situation could lead to noticeable flicker, especially as you moved your eyes, e.g. look away from the monitor and look back at it. The gray background made this flicker less noticeable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refresh_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refresh_rate
- Santosh83 5y ago> Interactive states should always be styled in your stylesheets. Examples include: touch, visited, hover, active and focus. Agree in general, but I wonder if a separate style for visited hyperlinks is still useful these days? Does anyone benefit by visited links being differentiated (by colour or another means) from unvisited ones?
- hunter2_ 5y agoThere are countless reddit comments that mention gleaning information from purple links, because it's useful.
- godshatter 5y agoWhen I'm at a site with many different topics in a list, it's nice to see which ones I've already visited. Links that don't show this or (even worse) don't differentiate as a link until they are moused over are one of my pet peeves.
- janvdberg 5y agoSemi-related: I recently learned [1] that there is a third color associated with links: blue for standard, purple for visited, and red WHILE actively clicking the link (I don't think I noticed this before). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLdDvQym5xk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLdDvQym5xk
- themodelplumber 5y agoLink, Visited, Hover, Active...I think you're referring to the last one? I remember learning these with the LoVe / HAte mnemonic for CSS. Maybe from Cameron Moll, can't remember...
- hunter2_ 5y ago> many links, specifically hyperlinks, are blue What does this superset/subset relationship refer to? I thought link was just a shortened word meaning the same as hyperlink.
- tyingq 5y agoInteresting topic, for sure, but the info on what colors were used by "Gopher Protocol" and "Linux Kernel" are pretty silly. Those colors would vary by what real or emulated terminal somebody was using.
- dkarl 5y agoI thought that was a nice little touch of humor.
- DonHopkins 5y agoBen Shneiderman developed "TIES" aka "HyperTIES" at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, and here's what he recently wrote in response to a question about hyperlinks, in which he mentioned the origin of blue as a highlighting color. Also here's a link to an article about the NeWS version of HyperTIES that we developed at HCIL, and some demos of HyperTIES and its Emacs based authoring tool, which had pie menus and embedded interactive PostScript "applets" in 1988. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-to-facilitate-browsing-a-look-back-at-the-hyperties-workstation-browser-535eab3a3b3c https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-to-facilitate-brows... HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM&ab_channel=DonHopkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM&ab_channel=DonHo... HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU&ab_channel=DonHopkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU&ab_channel=DonHo... Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg&ab_channel=CatherinePlaisant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg&ab_channel=Cathe... John Gilmore via Internet-history <internet-history@elists.isoc.org> Date: Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 11:56 PM To: Brian, internet-history, Jeff I forwarded this question to my friend Don Hopkins, who was a student of Ben Shneiderman back in the day. Ben ultimately responded: From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@cs.umd.edu> To: Don Hopkins <don@donhopkins.com> CC: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>, Ben Shneiderman <ben@cs.umd.edu> Subject: RE: [ih] origins of the term "hyperlink" Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 15:15:52 +0000 HI Don (and Jack Gilmore), Thanks for including me in this conversation. I do not have a claim for the term “hyperlinks” and don’t know when it came into use. My claim is for the visual interface for showing highlighted selectable links embedded in paragraphs. This is what we called embedded menu items in that I think is an influential paper on the topic, which was peer-reviewed and published in the CACM in April 1986. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/5684.5687 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/5684.5687 http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Koved1986Embedded.pdf http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Koved1986Embedded.pdf While Engelbart had shown a list that could be selected by pointing and clicking in 1968, I claim the idea of embedded highlighted selectable text in paragraphs. This was implemented by grad student Daniel Ostroff and described in: Ewing J, Mehrabanzad S, Sheck S, Ostroff D and Shneiderman B (1986), "An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia", International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Jan., 1986, Vol 24, pp. 29-45. [Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI] Ostroff D and Shneiderman B (1988), "Selection devices for users of an electronic encyclopedia: an empirical comparison of four possibilities", Information Processing and Management, Nov., 1988, Vol 24(6), pp. 665-680. [Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI] I think the 1988 paper was the earlier study, but the publication took a while. My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted. His systems with embedded menus (or hot spots), where a significant user interface improvement over early systems such as Gopher. But Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project that we used Hyperties to build for the July 1988 CACM that held the articles from the July 1987 Hypertext conference at the University of North Carolina. The ACM sold 4000 copies of our Hypertext on Hypertext disks. Our history is here: https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/ https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/ and the video is very helpful in showing the design we used, which is what I think Tim built on for his WWW prototypes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg So in summary, I don’t know who coined hypertext, but I do think our work visual and interaction design was influential. Our Hyperties system was picked up by Cognetics Corporation (around 1987) who made a modestly successful commercial run with it, doing dozens of corporate projects, most notably the Hewlett-Packard user manual for their Laserjet 4 was distributed as a Hyperties disk. Hyperties was the name we shifted to after we got a stop and desist order from a lawyer because our TIES (The Interactive Encyclopedia System) conflicted with an existing product. By then “hyper” was a growing term. Let me know if this helps, and what other questions you have…. Ben
- karmakaze 5y agoAlso worth mentioning that WinHelp (the F1 documentation pages) used green underlined text for links in some places (e.g. list of referred topics).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- KingOfCoders 5y ago1993? Not so sure about "simply because color monitors were becoming more popular around this time." Having lived through the 80s with computers and owning a Commodore 1084 I'd say most had color much earlier. I remember using the ViolaWww browser on a color XTerminal in 1992.
- ducttapecrown 5y agoBlue links turn purple because they get red.
- dotancohen 5y agoYellow, world!
- dredmorbius 5y agoYou realise on HN that this will be rated as a greyed comment?
- dredmorbius 5y agoGreyed -> great ;-)
- EGreg 5y agoThis article is so strange, even though it is hosted by Mozilla. Here is straight from the horse’s mouth, I remember Tim Berners-Lee reminiscing about green links originally A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn't used much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went color - I don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of course with CSS style sheets. There are many examples of style sheets which use different colors. My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green. One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena" browser which had a textured parchment background and embossed out the words of the link with a square apparently raised area. https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html
- dotancohen 5y agoActually, Mozilla had a great CEO but he was "cancelled" for not being woke enough. They then hired another CEO at four times his salary who drove the company to what it is today.
- jamienicol 5y agoGiven Brendan Eich was CEO of Mozilla for all of 11 days it seems slightly speculative to claim he was a "great" CEO
- DonHopkins 5y agoHow many times does this need to be repeated? Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich. He resigned of his own free will, against the Mozilla board's request that he stay. His own words and the Mozilla FAQ quoted below, I'm not just making this up. Down the following thread, Brendan suggested googling "constructive separation" -- but I'm not sure if he meant for that euphemism to apply to how he left his job at Mozilla, or to how he wanted to cancel and destroy existing happy same sex marriages in California against their consent. All of the google results have to do with marriage, not employment. Brendan, care to clarify? As JavaScript proves, Brendan Eich never really understood the concept of equality: https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/ https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24127716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24127716 DonHopkins 3 months ago | on: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses ... Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignation/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat... Q: Was Brendan Eich fired? A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said: “I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.” Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic. Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board? A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role. It's a common misconception which is a key part of the narrative that Brendan's Alt-Right Incel GamerGate supporters were doing their best to spread at the time (GamerGate was in full swing when he resigned, and the Alt-Right jumped on the issue at the expense of Mozilla), in order to help Brendan play the victim (instead of respecting Brendan's own victims and co-workers whose marriages he wanted to terminate) and make him a martyr. (Not that I think you're one of them, but they unfortunately succeeded at spreading the misconception that Brendan was fired far and wide, in the service of their cultural war.) Edit: And do you acknowledge that Brendan wanted to cancel many same sex marriages in California? And do you agree or disagree with him that those marriages should have been canceled? Because he got what he paid for, Proposition 8 passed, and those marriages WERE canceled. Which is worse: canceling one job, or thousands of marriages? Edit 2: It's pretty rich that Brendan would claim to be the one suffering from a hostile work environment, when he was the one who wanted to destroy the marriages of his co-workers and users. Was it too much for him to bear facing the dirty looks of his co-workers who he didn't believe deserved the same rights as he enjoyed? Bullies are always playing the victim. Breaking apart other people's marriages sounds more like "destructive separation" to me.
- jrochkind1 5y ago> Another interesting thing about Windows 1.0 that still appears in modern websites is the underlined hyperlink. This is the first example of an underline being used to indicate a hyperlink that I have been able to find. I'm confused, what in Windows 1.0 is, or is being called, a "hyperlink" that's underlined? Is it shown in the screenshots? I wouldn't have expected there would be such thing as a "hyperlink" in Windows 1.0, and am not sure what the author is referring to.
- ectopod 5y agoIt's the window with the caption "Microsoft Help". (And it's actually Windows 2, not 1 as the article claims.) A help file was a bunch of hyperlinked rich-text documents in a single file. The hyperlinks could even span help files, though I don't know which Windows version introduced that. (Edited for tone.)
- JonathonW 5y agoGiven the author's "conclusions" about Windows's influence here, it's probably worth mentioning that Windows 3.x (including both 3.0 and 3.1) used green for hyperlinks in its help system by default (which was hypertext but not HTML): https://i.imgur.com/ZjX5xIW.png https://i.imgur.com/ZjX5xIW.png Green hyperlinks stuck around in the Windows 95 help system, and were eventually replaced when Windows 98 switched to Microsoft's new HTML Help system which defaulted to blue hyperlinks (inherited from Internet Explorer).
- slingnow 5y agoIt's likely this person came across this during their research, but decided to omit it because it didn't fit in with their already weak and speculative narrative.
- sgarrity 5y agoI always assumed that the green help links color was intentionally differentiated from regular blue web links to clearly imply that they remain within the "Help" universe. The timeline might undermine my assumption.
- JonathonW 5y agoI don't think the timeframe's right for that-- were there ever even any web browsers that ran on Windows 3.0? At any rate, there wouldn't be any need to distinguish internal help links from web links, because neither Windows 3.0 nor 3.1 ever shipped with a web browser-- can't link out in your docs if the tools aren't available to follow the links. Early versions of Windows 95 didn't, either, with IE 2.0 being bundled with the OS for the first time with OSR1.
- timClicks 5y agoI might be remembering this incorrectly, but I don't think that Windows 3.0 even had support for TCP/IP networking by default.
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- namanyayg 5y agoAll these screenshots look so beautiful. No telemetry, no gamification, just function.
- codazoda 5y agoI was kind of surprised the article didn't discuss the BBS culture that existed before the internet. The blue link may have started after this but maybe it borrowed a bit from the colored keyboard characters used in text-based menu systems. I also used the something-folio hypertext system before I used hypertext on the web. Did it have blue links? I can't remember.
- LocalPCGuy 5y agoI was looking for information on BBS culture also, but in my fuzzy memory of those times, the vast majority were very much a dark color scheme, black/dark background with light text. And there was a lot of customization going on as well, but I don't know if I can see BBSes as a place the link color came from. It's also probably one of the most obscured and overlooked part leading to the rise of the internet, I rarely see it mentioned in "history of" articles.
- joking 5y agothis is the perfect example of how to write something wrong on internet, so you can get all the correct facts for free from strangers and you can write a correct article
- lordgrenville 5y ago(aka Cunningham's Law)
- GekkePrutser 5y agoI knew this was introduced by NCSA Mosaic. I remember it well. It was actually a very good browser. Not as many features as Netscape but it was very fast. Netscape added too many fluff features like backgrounds and moving GIFs which were abused way too much (see any "1990s retro web site" for what I mean), so I often opted to using Mosaic even after Netscape became mainstream. It makes sense too, black doesn't stand out enough from unlinked text. And can be confused with regular non-link underlining. It could have been any colour but it's a good convention. After all we could also have used green for stop and red for go (like in the first episode of "Sliders" :) ), but at least everyone around the world uses the same.
- itomato 5y ago...X11R3. https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/support/html/Docs/resources.html https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/support/html/Docs/resources... anchorColor: color Color to shade anchors whose corresponding documents haven't been previously visited. Default is blue3. visitedAnchorColor: color Color to shade anchors whose corresponding documents have been previously visited. Default is violetred4. activeAnchorFG: color Color to shade anchors that are in the process of being activated. Default is red. activeAnchorBG: color Color to shade the background of anchors that are in the process of being activated. Default is grey80 (the same color as the application's background).
- richardwhiuk 5y agoDon't see any evidence X11R3 is involved? That's just the docs for Mosaic which TFA says was responsible.
- omar_kha 5y agoyet this website has black links
- michaelhoffman 5y agoI believe OS/2 1.2's help system used a different color for hyperlinks but it's hard to find a definitive screenshot.
- sysadm1n 5y agoI find myself touching any piece of text that is blue, for example an AD in my local newspaper that has some text in blue. This is due to an ingrained pattern of behavior and the result of being decades on the web. In the future when augmented reality becomes the norm, it could be possible that clicking this blue link actually brings up a webpage, either on my phone, or broadcasted into my retina. QR codes just don't cut it.
- rietta 5y agoJust checked on my Windows 3.1 QEMU image and Help used Green hyperlinks still then.
- m0rti 5y agoIt is similar to why we chose gold to use as “gold” as humanity. Not all elements are suitable to be used as a store of value and physical currency. Let’s look at the primary and secondary colours. Yellow: Bad contrast. Red or Green: Action colours, would be bad to see them everywhere. Plus there might be accessibility concerns. Orange: Mostly used as “Not as urgent as red”. Purple: Not as neutral as blue, yet it is the second best option, that’s why visited hyperlinks are purple I assume. It is the logical choice. We are left with the colour blue. Also, a plus that it is a primary colour; I would assume it is easier to display primary colours in earlier tech.
- amelius 5y agoOn HN they are not ...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- SeanLuke 5y agoIn 1990 NeXT released the NeXTstation Color. There are screenshots online of WorldWideWeb.app running on the NextStation Color, and the hyperlinks are all blue. It's true that Tim Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb.app on monochrome NeXT cubes, but it seems reasonable that the default underlining he used (in the Text object) may have been blue when displayed in color. Very strange that this article didn't bother to even consider or investigate this, simply dismissing the NeXT as monochrome. See for example: https://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap2_24c.gif https://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb#/media/File:WorldWideWeb_FSF_GNU.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb#/media/File:World...
- js2 5y agoThose screenshots are from 1993 ("This is a (242kB) screen shot of the browser, taken when things had got to the point that Communications of the ACM was interested in an article, in 1993."[1]), which matches the year the blog post settled upon for when blue links appeared, but that still doesn't answer why they are blue. Can you find a screenshot definitively from before 1993 that shows blue hyperlinks? 1. https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html
- SeanLuke 5y agoNope, can't find any color screenshots earlier than 1993. But WorldWideWeb.app would have run just fine on the NextStation Color, and NeXT machines elegantly provided a path to color from the very beginning, even when in monochrome. I don't know if pre-1993 links were gray or blue, but one would have thought the author would have bothered to investigate what color the links were. My money is on blue. I'll bet Tim could say for sure. EDIT: as of 1991 (the earliest known code), it was still a black underline in the code. See line 640 of https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/master/NextStep/Implementation/HyperText.m https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/master/NextStep... As of March 1991 he was contemplating providing color underlines, see line 61 here: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/master/NextStep/Implementation/Features.html https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/master/NextStep... Clearly it changed between 1991 and 1993 but I don't know when. Money still on WorldWideWeb.app being the first blue link application.
- quartz 5y agoI'm curious what Lynx, which is curiously absent from this piece, did with hyperlinks since it was released in '92 I think?
- sedatk 5y agoTL;DR: Mosaic 0.13 introduced the blue links because it had to distinguish visited and unvisited links. Just paraphrasing article here, not sure about it's accuracy since many have pointed out its inaccuracies.
- js2 5y agoFrom https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html Q: I'm a student of visual communications and asked myself why links are blue. I found some answers that might be, for example blue is a color of learning, but I'm not sure what is right. Is there any reason, why links are colored blue ? A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn't used much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went color - I don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of course with CSS style sheets. There are many examples of style sheets which use different colors. My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green. One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena" browser which had a textured parchment background and embossed out the words of the link with a square apparently raised area. [See also https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/why-hyperlinks-are-blue/ https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/why-hyperlinks-are-blue/ which links to the answer above but also contains a few other references.]
- gabereiser 5y agoI believe this is the correct answer. It was the default for Netscape navigator back in early 90s. If you wrote an html page without styles it gave you a white background, blue hyperlinks, and times new roman font. As for why the default for NN was blue, I really don’t know other than the juxtaposition of it vs normal text. To claim it was mosaic would align with my history of it with NN though.
- Terretta 5y agoIf someone in 1989 handed you an article with occasional markings added indicating important terms or concepts, it was probably a blue underline, which contrasted and stood out nicely from the black photocopy or print.
- 5y ago
- layer8 5y agoThe simplest explanation is that blue is the darkest of the primary colors (at full intensity, think 8/16-color palette) and hence has the best contrast on white or gray background (after black). It also helps that it isn’t a signalling color like red (important/error) and green (good/go).
- defaulty 5y agoThe story of the blink tag is much more interesting
- 5faulker 5y agoInteresting that the post's coming from a tangerine lover.
- feffe 5y agoMaybe because blue is the most visible color against a white background, except for black? Like blue and black are the two most common pen ink colors.
- floor_ 5y agoSpoiler, this article doesn't answer the question.
- davesque 5y agoI remember when a friend of mine in middle school fired up the first version of Mosaic on his mac. I could hardly even tell what the point of the application (as they used to be called) was. He was also really into hypercard. We actually did a school project together in hypercard. I had really no idea at the time that such technologies would become so widespread and important. They initially seemed really arbitrary.
- dredmorbius 5y agoGiven that numerous early Web clients were text-based (especially www and lynx), there's the question of what colours were available on a (possibly) colour-capable display, or a colour-aware terminal emulator. These would have been provided through ANSI escape sequences, which allowed for white, black, red, green, blue, yellow, magenta, and cyan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code With a bright background (white), blue is the most clearly-visible non-black colour, and avoids R-G colourblindness issues. On a dark background (black), cyan is light enough to be readable, but not as glaringly distracting as either red or yellow. Given the prevalence of green and amber phosphor displays, and some adoption of that colour scheme for terminal colours, yellow and green might have been avoided due to conflicts with standard text. The next question is when colour support was added to terminals. I'm confident that xterm could have foreground/background colours specified by 1997. Support for 16 colours didn't hit xterm until 1996: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_39 https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_39 rxvt may have had colour support earlier. I'm unsure of dates or changelogs though it's mentioned in print as of 1994: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_X_Resource/RKhFAQAAMAAJ?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_X_Resource/RKhFAQAA...
- sleavey 5y agoAnother curiosity related to this one is why <h5> and <h6> have smaller default font sizes than <p>, given that they are headers and should therefore "head" a section of text [1]. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55696808/why-do-h5-and-h6-have-smaller-font-sizes-than-p-in-most-user-agent-default https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55696808/why-do-h5-and-h...
- Terretta 5y agoThey weren’t when I started web designing. As noted in that excellent answer.
- ridaj 5y ago> What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one knows, but I have some theories. I doubt that no one knows. They found the smoking gun in the Mosaic release notes - the people who worked there are probably still alive and might remember why!
- robbrown451 5y agoSeems pretty obvious to me that blue is the color that gives best contrast to a white background, while not being black or being so dark a color that the hue doesn't stand out. This is why blue pens are considered the only acceptable pen for writing (such as filling in a form, or a school paper) other than black. Similar to the reason to use yellow for highlighter and otherwise for changing the background color, you want a light color whose hue is detectable, but it similar enough to the white background that text is still easy to read. The Munsell color solid is distorted to show that pure yellow is light, pure blue is dark. https://art-design-glossary.musabi.ac.jp/wpwp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/228_color-solid_01.jpg https://art-design-glossary.musabi.ac.jp/wpwp/wp-content/upl...
- Terretta 5y ago> blue is the color Yes. If you were handed a printout or photo copy in 1980s with some terms or phrases manually marked to stand out, it was probably with blue underlines. Black didn’t stand out, red was for corrections. That simple.
- ChrisArchitect 5y agothis is a really long clickbait-y/listicle type article that I wouldn't have expected to be on mozilla. Despite it's "deep dive" it barely answers it's own question and just beats around random browser/computing history like we can't see that anywhere else? Weak.
- masswerk 5y agoMy two cents: I think, it's mostly due to grey background color, text contrast and CRT rendering. In reverse order: * Not all colors lent themselves equally well to a CRT, especially to the more cost effective ones. Green, esp. when in multiple shades, didn't render well (or, the other way round, issues with green are more easily detected by the human eye), so you won't see much green in early color UIs (or rather bright single-color expressions in elements like bars). * Also, CRT specific, you want to stick with primary colors (RGB), since even a small misalignment of the cathodes will result in blurry text in more evenly distributed hues. (Same is true for the outer regions of larger color CRTs with shadow masks.) * Monitor calibration wasn't always the best, shades of grey often exhibited a red hue, esp. on systems with a gamma of 2.0. * Considering what we have established, we are searching for a color which consists mostly of R, G, or B and renders well on an average color CRT on top of a grey background of #C0C0C0. (Also, mind that in 1993/4, we're probably not speaking of millions of colors to choose from, but rather more of a 4-bit color palette, if we're looking for robustness.) - Green, as already established, is somewhat complicated. Also, a mostly green color of comparable intensity is perceived somewhat brighter than, say a blue one. It will stand out against black text, probably more than you want, and it's contrast ratio to a light grey suffering from a red tint isn't great. - Red may not be the best choice either, as its contrast to grey isn't the best (ask your printer) – and its use may be best reserved for representing an active state. (There's also the cultural issue with red usually signifying limits or even off-limit areas, which isn't especially inviting.) - Which leaves blue for a passive state, which is actually a good choice. It's perceived slightly darker than the other primary colors, which is favorable for rendering text, it has a good contrast against light grey, and isn't affected by any missalignments or color calibration issues (as it doesn't share with red), and, while visible, isn't too distracting in what is mostly black text (you still want to provide for fluent reading of a given text, even, if it embeds a link). Moreover, it is more friendly to impaired vision than green or red (which are actually used in diagnosing defective vision). Properties, for which it had been used as a favorite color in UIs already. Moreover, on the cultural side of things, where red indicates restriction, blue indicates recommendation and instruction (compare traffic signs). So, I think, blue was quite a natural choice.
- bencollier49 5y agoInteresting article, but written by Americans it necessarily missed another ancestor of the blue hyperlink, Teletext. Given that Tim Berners-Lee is English, it's relevant.
- gnicholas 5y agoSome websites have been playing with this in recent years. Fast Company uses an orange color (with no underlining) [1] and Wired experimented with thick underlining, which I always thought looked terrible. [2] 1: https://www.fastcompany.com/90669062/is-your-brand-on-mute-why-the-worlds-biggest-companies-are-investing-in-sound https://www.fastcompany.com/90669062/is-your-brand-on-mute-w... 2: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24691460/how-does-wired-magazine-achieve-this-thick-underline-link-effect https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24691460/how-does-wired-...
- kbob 5y agoIIRC, Dan Connolly, when he was at Convex, wrote an SGML viewer that used blue hyperlinks. He did this work in 1990-92. At the same time, he was collaborating with Tim Berners-Lee in his spare time. So blue was in the air by then.
- thomasfl 5y ago"Rhapsody in #0000FF" - such a poetic title.