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From 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 w
by js2 5y ago
From 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.
- askvictor 5y agoI'm wondering why they chose a serif font as the default, given their rendering on low-res screens (as most were at that time) is pretty bad.
- eropple 5y agoI've wondered this before, but never found much concrete--except that being picky about rendering serifs on "low resolution" screens is a very modern thing in itself! My intuition is that it comes from books/newspapers and nascent desktop publishing universes; sans-serif fonts being used for large amounts of body text anywhere, on paper or not, is relatively new as a mainstream thing. (That isn't to say it never happened, just that it's historically rare.)
- sirspacey 5y agoI always thought it was ported over from Apple’s Hypertext pre-internet
- cma 5y agoBlue is the least dense rod cell, so shows up best against white over any other color. Green is the most dense rod cell, so shows up best against black. This is why Apple makes Android users have white on green text, the least readable choice.