6 ms·

Why are hyperlinks blue? (2021)

100 points by redbell 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
a weak clickbait-y post from 2021 that didn't even really answer its own question etc. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934
- dazc 1y ago
  Quite amusing once you know the real answer.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  I (or a commenter who goes by the same name) contacted the author Elise Blanchard and introduced her to Ben Shneiderman, and gave her some links to our work on HyperTIES. She wrote a followup article with more detailed information. Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperlinks-blue-revisited/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli... It wasn't just a random or intuitive choice, but the results of many empirical studies and experiments (which is Ben's whole "thing", and unfortunately extremely rare these days): >“We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.” Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988 - Ben demonstrating HyperTIES with blue hyperlinks, the system that influenced Tim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg Here is my post to the hn discussion of her first article, included an email Ben wrote to me a year before the article, full of citations and links to papers and web pages about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921532 >Ben Shneiderman recalled that "Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project". >Ben Shneiderman wrote the following email to John Gilmore and I, in response to a question John asked me about the origin of the term "hyperlink" raised in a discussion on the Internet History mailing list. John then forwarded Ben's email to the Internet History mailing list. https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-April/005956.html https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri... ---- From: Ben Shneiderman <ben at cs.umd.edu> To: Don Hopkins <don at donhopkins.com> CC: John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com>, Ben Shneiderman <ben at cs.umd.edu> Subject: RE: [ih] origins of the term "hyperlink" X-ASG-Orig-Subj: 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 ---- Here's more information about our work on HyperTIES and other stuff like pie menus and tabbed windows at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab: HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac... Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117. https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsing-a-look-back-at-the-hyperties-workstation-browser-535eab3a3b3c https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...
bertili 1y ago
Blue was by far the easiest on the eye compared to Red, Green, Yellow, Cyan, Purple, on a white background, on old CRT monitors. The more interesting question is why were backgrounds white rather than black?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  To match word processors in looking like paper maybe?
  - ghaff 1y ago
    More or less, from what I've read. Once there wasn't a technical issue, a white (or near white) background became seen as more user-friendly than a black background.
    - dredmorbius 1y ago
      Or you could opt for WordPerfect's compromise: white-on-blue. I'll still use that as an editing background at times.
  - fsckboy 1y ago
    many of the suggestions are part of the right set of ideas, there was more than one reason, including mimicking paper. at that time many of these things were new and hadn't been done before, so they were done to show that it could be done or to see how it looked and it was fresh. (like the iphone's new liquid glass, is that really the best idea for a UI (feels it was only yesterday we got rid of the <blink> tag) or is it just new?) so to add to the mix, that with a monochrome display, relatively low rez lighted pixels making letters (on a black background) still has the letters looking pixelated. the same lighted pixels making a white background leaves the black letters looking smoother. outside of "labs", i remember the VT-100 being the first "white paper" display that was generally in use, but that could have been a regional thing in the shadow of the Maynard mill.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
suhail 1y ago
I actually asked Marc Andreessen this question a few years ago while making a browser. Me: “why did you decide to make links blue?” Marc: “I sure as hell wasn’t going to make them pink.” Me: “what about green?” Marc: “ew”
- drob518 1y ago
  Can’t fault his logic.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Here is some email between Ben Shneiderman and Mark Andreessen about it that I posted to the Internet History mailing list archive with their permission: https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-April/005961.html https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri... And a couple of relevant papers: Embedded menus: Selecting Items in Context; Larry Koved and Ben Shneiderman; Communications of the ACM, Computing Practices, April 1986, Volume 29, Number 4, p. 312-318: https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menues-CACM-4-1986.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menue... An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia; John Ewing, Simin Mehrabanzad, Scott Sheck, Dan Ostroff and Ben Shneiderman; International Journal of Man Machine Studies (1986) 24, p. 29-45: https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-arrowkeys-IJMMS-1986-01-published.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-ar...
p0w3n3d 1y ago
What I am fairly sure at the moment, is that they no longer are. People are doing everything possible to NOT make them blue, which something makes them very hard to find
- UweSchmidt 1y ago
  Even more important would be the purple hyperlinks (or any other distinct style) for those links that you've already visited.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    I've never liked that feature. You save a page to a PDF and it gets stuck in this permanent mix of blue and purple links. I've never needed my browser to tell me what I have and haven't visited. Especially since I use different browsers on different devices, so it's never even accurate anyways.
  - p0w3n3d 1y ago
    true, however when we moved out to javascript, this rarely make sense (I mean in the percentage, but the content-related links should be restyled on :visited pseudo class)
mikeryan 1y ago
They’re blue because Marc Andreesen liked blue. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPO0A7dDvFm/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ== https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPO0A7dDvFm/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ...
- mmoustafa 1y ago
  … according to Marc Andreesen
zkmon 1y ago
That's like reading about evolution of internet browsers. I witnessed the stuff since around 1991. I suspect the W3C and other standards bodies such as IETF might also have had some role in the matters of rendering the HTML markup. Ofcourse Mozilla was also a dominant player in shaping things up in this space.
patel011393 1y ago
They're blue because computer scientist Ben Schneiderman made them blue using research from 1985: " In 1985, a group of students at the University of Maryland, mentored by computer science professor Ben Shneiderman , conducted a series of experiments to study the impact of different hyperlink colors on user experience. They were eager to determine which color would be the most effective in terms of visibility and readability. The experiments revealed interesting findings. While red highlighting made the links more noticeable, it negatively affected users' ability to read and comprehend the surrounding text. On the other hand, blue emerged as the clear winner. It was dark enough to be visible against a white background and light enough to stand out on a black background. Most importantly, it did not interfere with users' retention of the text's context." Mozille should really do better research before posting histories like this. It's easy to overlook the impact of academic research in tech. Source: Barooah, S. (2023, June 09). Why Were Hyperlinks Chosen To Be Blue? Retrieved from https://www.newspointapp.com/english/tech/why-were-hyperlinks-chosen-to-be-blue/articleshow/100877379.cms https://www.newspointapp.com/english/tech/why-were-hyperlink...
- valiant55 1y ago
  What did the internet look like in 1985? I was under the impression that it'd all be terminal based since the world wide web didn't exist. I'm not sure how a hyperlink would function in such an interface.
  - wmf 1y ago
    Check out HyperCard; it had hyperlinks before the Web.
    - seltzered_ 1y ago
      Related - The Computer Chronicles - Hypercard (1987) https://youtu.be/FquNpWdf9vg https://youtu.be/FquNpWdf9vg Note that hyperlinks in hypercard weren't blue necessarily, but the mouse cursor did change to indicate it was clickable.
    - crazygringo 1y ago
nftu 1y ago
As a red-green colorblind person, curse the person who decided visited links should be purple.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  You can override this in most browsers. (And for those where you can't, there's always userstyles.)
GuB-42 1y ago
Starting from a white background, what other color can it be? It has to be a dark color, and blue is the darkest of the primary and secondary colors. With 16 color displays typical at the time, you can use one of the 8 remaining "half brightness" colors. Dark red is still red, and red tends to mean that something is wrong, which is not the message here. Dark blue and grey do not provide enough of a contrast. Dark yellow and dark green look ugly, they use it in generic cigarette packaging for that reason. Dark cyan could have worked I guess, but that's still a shade of blue, so you might as well just use blue. Go beyond the VGA standard 16 colors and many computers of the time may not render it correctly.
- geoffpado 1y ago
  > Starting from a white background Possibly an incorrect assumption. As several of the screenshots in the article show, the default background color of the web back then was gray, not white.
crazygringo 1y ago
So Mosaic did it in 1993. I could have sworn WinHelp [1] (the help viewer built into Windows 3.0) did it in 1990, but looking it up it turns out their hyperlinks were dark green. My memory had changed them to blue retroactively... A couple of images: https://virtuallyfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/WinHelp-from-Windows-NT-3.1-refresh.png https://virtuallyfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/WinHelp-... https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~mgoetsch/cali/Windows%20Configuration/Windows%20Configuration%20Html/help0042.gif https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~mgoetsch/cali/Windows%20Config... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinHelp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinHelp
- dboreham 1y ago
  Thanks for posting because I had the same false memory that WinHelp used blue links. I certainly don't remember feeling that anything about the first browsers or html was new and surprising. It was more like "oh good someone made a free implementation of that obvious idea". There were plenty of documentation systems used industrially that also had links. Gopher existed.
dang 1y ago
Related (including alternative answers): Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811 - Jan 2022 (60 comments) Why are hyperlinks blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934 - Aug 2021 (255 comments)
mrandish 1y ago
One thing worth mentioning as a possibly-contributing factor was that in the very early 90s a lot of the installed base of high-res (eg non-interlaced) color monitors where still digital RGB (RGBI) which were limited to 16 colors (and often just 8 colors in two intensities each). In many palettes the 8 base colors were black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow. So, there weren't a lot of colors to choose from. CRTs had RGB primaries so cyan, magenta and yellow weren't generally as legible for single pixel width lines (ie text). I also always assumed part of the choice of blue was that in many locales red, yellow and green have connotations of stop/alert, warning and go/okay (respectively) - whereas blue was relatively more agnostic. So... if you're targeting the widest installed base of displays, out of the lowest common denominator choices available blue was pretty much the obvious remaining choice.
the_mitsuhiko 1y ago
There is a video of marc andreesen going around where that question given to him: https://x.com/mrexits/status/1956237638878552418 https://x.com/mrexits/status/1956237638878552418
aatd86 1y ago
So did Marc Andreessen take undeserved credit or not? That's what I want to know...
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Yes, or maybe he didn't know or remember what influenced Tim Berners Lee to make them blue, so he just took credit for himself decades later, so yes. Ben Shneiderman and his students originally performed experiments that determined that blue was the best color, then Ben developed and ACM distributed HyperTIES with blue links as "Hypertext on Hypertext", which Tim saw, and years later Tim told Ben that it influenced him to make the links blue. Here is some email between Ben Shneiderman and Mark Andreessen about it that I posted to the Internet History mailing list archive with their permission: https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-April/005961.html https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri... Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988 - Ben demonstrating HyperTIES with blue hyperlinks, the system that influenced Tim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg And a couple of relevant papers: Embedded menus: Selecting Items in Context; Larry Koved and Ben Shneiderman; Communications of the ACM, Computing Practices, April 1986, Volume 29, Number 4, p. 312-318: https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menues-CACM-4-1986.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menue... An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia; John Ewing, Simin Mehrabanzad, Scott Sheck, Dan Ostroff and Ben Shneiderman; International Journal of Man Machine Studies (1986) 24, p. 29-45: https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-arrowkeys-IJMMS-1986-01-published.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-ar...
rappatic 1y ago
Intuitively it makes a lot of sense. Red is obviously associated with “bad/stop/destructive” and green with “positive/go” while blue is neutral in this respect. The other colors aren’t primary and they have their own problems: orange is too similar to red and yellow is too hard to make out against a white background. Purple is okay which is why it’s used for “visited” links but it’s much less ubiquitous than blue in everyday life which makes it gaudy/distinctive.
ghssds 1y ago
Microsoft's EDIT, QBASIC, QuickBASIC and MSDOS 6.x had on-screen help in the form of hypertext documents with white links inside green brackets on a black background. It looked good. Windows 3.1x also had on-screen help in the form of hypertext documents with underlined green links on a white background. It also looked good. They cherry-picked their examples by talking about Windows 3.1 without mentioning that. First time I experienced the world wide web, it was using NCSA Mosaic and it featured blue hyperlinks instead of green, which was a surprise.
drob518 1y ago
I suspect it’s for the same reason that the two most popular pen colors are black and blue. On light backgrounds, blue shows up well and doesn’t impede readability. So, if all your text is black by default and you want another default color that is also readable, blue’s an obvious choice. Add underlines for users working in grayscale environments.
ivankelly 1y ago
They’re blue because pmarca was a democrat back then
agiacalone 1y ago
I’m pretty sure that Gopher was only “Green on Black” because many of the terminals used to display them (ie. DEC’s VT220) used green phosphors. If you had a white phosphor terminal, it would have been White on Black.
yzydserd 1y ago
No mention of the Amiga? Amiga Guide is a hypertext format, first released around 1992 with Workbench 2.1 I think, with Blue highlighting, again if memory serves, inherited from the OS theme.

100 points by redbell 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

a weak clickbait-y post from 2021 that didn't even really answer its own question etc. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934

dazc 1y ago
Quite amusing once you know the real answer.
DonHopkins 1y ago
I (or a commenter who goes by the same name) contacted the author Elise Blanchard and introduced her to Ben Shneiderman, and gave her some links to our work on HyperTIES. She wrote a followup article with more detailed information. Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperlinks-blue-revisited/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli... It wasn't just a random or intuitive choice, but the results of many empirical studies and experiments (which is Ben's whole "thing", and unfortunately extremely rare these days): >“We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.” Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988 - Ben demonstrating HyperTIES with blue hyperlinks, the system that influenced Tim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg Here is my post to the hn discussion of her first article, included an email Ben wrote to me a year before the article, full of citations and links to papers and web pages about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921532 >Ben Shneiderman recalled that "Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project". >Ben Shneiderman wrote the following email to John Gilmore and I, in response to a question John asked me about the origin of the term "hyperlink" raised in a discussion on the Internet History mailing list. John then forwarded Ben's email to the Internet History mailing list. https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-April/005956.html https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri... ---- From: Ben Shneiderman <ben at cs.umd.edu> To: Don Hopkins <don at donhopkins.com> CC: John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com>, Ben Shneiderman <ben at cs.umd.edu> Subject: RE: [ih] origins of the term "hyperlink" X-ASG-Orig-Subj: 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 ---- Here's more information about our work on HyperTIES and other stuff like pie menus and tabbed windows at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab: HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac... Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117. https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsing-a-look-back-at-the-hyperties-workstation-browser-535eab3a3b3c https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...

bertili 1y ago

Blue was by far the easiest on the eye compared to Red, Green, Yellow, Cyan, Purple, on a white background, on old CRT monitors. The more interesting question is why were backgrounds white rather than black?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
To match word processors in looking like paper maybe?
- ghaff 1y ago
  More or less, from what I've read. Once there wasn't a technical issue, a white (or near white) background became seen as more user-friendly than a black background.
  - dredmorbius 1y ago
    Or you could opt for WordPerfect's compromise: white-on-blue. I'll still use that as an editing background at times.
- fsckboy 1y ago
  many of the suggestions are part of the right set of ideas, there was more than one reason, including mimicking paper. at that time many of these things were new and hadn't been done before, so they were done to show that it could be done or to see how it looked and it was fresh. (like the iphone's new liquid glass, is that really the best idea for a UI (feels it was only yesterday we got rid of the <blink> tag) or is it just new?) so to add to the mix, that with a monochrome display, relatively low rez lighted pixels making letters (on a black background) still has the letters looking pixelated. the same lighted pixels making a white background leaves the black letters looking smoother. outside of "labs", i remember the VT-100 being the first "white paper" display that was generally in use, but that could have been a regional thing in the shadow of the Maynard mill.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

suhail 1y ago

I actually asked Marc Andreessen this question a few years ago while making a browser. Me: “why did you decide to make links blue?” Marc: “I sure as hell wasn’t going to make them pink.” Me: “what about green?” Marc: “ew”

drob518 1y ago
Can’t fault his logic.
DonHopkins 1y ago
Here is some email between Ben Shneiderman and Mark Andreessen about it that I posted to the Internet History mailing list archive with their permission: https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-April/005961.html https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri... And a couple of relevant papers: Embedded menus: Selecting Items in Context; Larry Koved and Ben Shneiderman; Communications of the ACM, Computing Practices, April 1986, Volume 29, Number 4, p. 312-318: https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menues-CACM-4-1986.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menue... An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia; John Ewing, Simin Mehrabanzad, Scott Sheck, Dan Ostroff and Ben Shneiderman; International Journal of Man Machine Studies (1986) 24, p. 29-45: https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-arrowkeys-IJMMS-1986-01-published.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-ar...

p0w3n3d 1y ago

What I am fairly sure at the moment, is that they no longer are. People are doing everything possible to NOT make them blue, which something makes them very hard to find

UweSchmidt 1y ago
Even more important would be the purple hyperlinks (or any other distinct style) for those links that you've already visited.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  I've never liked that feature. You save a page to a PDF and it gets stuck in this permanent mix of blue and purple links. I've never needed my browser to tell me what I have and haven't visited. Especially since I use different browsers on different devices, so it's never even accurate anyways.
- p0w3n3d 1y ago
  true, however when we moved out to javascript, this rarely make sense (I mean in the percentage, but the content-related links should be restyled on :visited pseudo class)

mikeryan 1y ago

They’re blue because Marc Andreesen liked blue. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPO0A7dDvFm/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ== https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPO0A7dDvFm/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ...

mmoustafa 1y ago
… according to Marc Andreesen

zkmon 1y ago

That's like reading about evolution of internet browsers. I witnessed the stuff since around 1991. I suspect the W3C and other standards bodies such as IETF might also have had some role in the matters of rendering the HTML markup. Ofcourse Mozilla was also a dominant player in shaping things up in this space.

patel011393 1y ago

They're blue because computer scientist Ben Schneiderman made them blue using research from 1985: " In 1985, a group of students at the University of Maryland, mentored by computer science professor Ben Shneiderman , conducted a series of experiments to study the impact of different hyperlink colors on user experience. They were eager to determine which color would be the most effective in terms of visibility and readability. The experiments revealed interesting findings. While red highlighting made the links more noticeable, it negatively affected users' ability to read and comprehend the surrounding text. On the other hand, blue emerged as the clear winner. It was dark enough to be visible against a white background and light enough to stand out on a black background. Most importantly, it did not interfere with users' retention of the text's context." Mozille should really do better research before posting histories like this. It's easy to overlook the impact of academic research in tech. Source: Barooah, S. (2023, June 09). Why Were Hyperlinks Chosen To Be Blue? Retrieved from https://www.newspointapp.com/english/tech/why-were-hyperlinks-chosen-to-be-blue/articleshow/100877379.cms https://www.newspointapp.com/english/tech/why-were-hyperlink...

valiant55 1y ago
What did the internet look like in 1985? I was under the impression that it'd all be terminal based since the world wide web didn't exist. I'm not sure how a hyperlink would function in such an interface.
- wmf 1y ago
  Check out HyperCard; it had hyperlinks before the Web.
  - seltzered_ 1y ago
    Related - The Computer Chronicles - Hypercard (1987) https://youtu.be/FquNpWdf9vg https://youtu.be/FquNpWdf9vg Note that hyperlinks in hypercard weren't blue necessarily, but the mouse cursor did change to indicate it was clickable.
  - crazygringo 1y ago

nftu 1y ago

As a red-green colorblind person, curse the person who decided visited links should be purple.

wizzwizz4 1y ago
You can override this in most browsers. (And for those where you can't, there's always userstyles.)

GuB-42 1y ago

Starting from a white background, what other color can it be? It has to be a dark color, and blue is the darkest of the primary and secondary colors. With 16 color displays typical at the time, you can use one of the 8 remaining "half brightness" colors. Dark red is still red, and red tends to mean that something is wrong, which is not the message here. Dark blue and grey do not provide enough of a contrast. Dark yellow and dark green look ugly, they use it in generic cigarette packaging for that reason. Dark cyan could have worked I guess, but that's still a shade of blue, so you might as well just use blue. Go beyond the VGA standard 16 colors and many computers of the time may not render it correctly.

geoffpado 1y ago
> Starting from a white background Possibly an incorrect assumption. As several of the screenshots in the article show, the default background color of the web back then was gray, not white.

crazygringo 1y ago

So Mosaic did it in 1993. I could have sworn WinHelp [1] (the help viewer built into Windows 3.0) did it in 1990, but looking it up it turns out their hyperlinks were dark green. My memory had changed them to blue retroactively... A couple of images: https://virtuallyfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/WinHelp-from-Windows-NT-3.1-refresh.png https://virtuallyfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/WinHelp-... https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~mgoetsch/cali/Windows%20Configuration/Windows%20Configuration%20Html/help0042.gif https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~mgoetsch/cali/Windows%20Config... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinHelp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinHelp

dboreham 1y ago
Thanks for posting because I had the same false memory that WinHelp used blue links. I certainly don't remember feeling that anything about the first browsers or html was new and surprising. It was more like "oh good someone made a free implementation of that obvious idea". There were plenty of documentation systems used industrially that also had links. Gopher existed.

dang 1y ago

Related (including alternative answers): Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811 - Jan 2022 (60 comments) Why are hyperlinks blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934 - Aug 2021 (255 comments)

mrandish 1y ago

One thing worth mentioning as a possibly-contributing factor was that in the very early 90s a lot of the installed base of high-res (eg non-interlaced) color monitors where still digital RGB (RGBI) which were limited to 16 colors (and often just 8 colors in two intensities each). In many palettes the 8 base colors were black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow. So, there weren't a lot of colors to choose from. CRTs had RGB primaries so cyan, magenta and yellow weren't generally as legible for single pixel width lines (ie text). I also always assumed part of the choice of blue was that in many locales red, yellow and green have connotations of stop/alert, warning and go/okay (respectively) - whereas blue was relatively more agnostic. So... if you're targeting the widest installed base of displays, out of the lowest common denominator choices available blue was pretty much the obvious remaining choice.

the_mitsuhiko 1y ago

There is a video of marc andreesen going around where that question given to him: https://x.com/mrexits/status/1956237638878552418 https://x.com/mrexits/status/1956237638878552418

aatd86 1y ago

So did Marc Andreessen take undeserved credit or not? That's what I want to know...

DonHopkins 1y ago
Yes, or maybe he didn't know or remember what influenced Tim Berners Lee to make them blue, so he just took credit for himself decades later, so yes. Ben Shneiderman and his students originally performed experiments that determined that blue was the best color, then Ben developed and ACM distributed HyperTIES with blue links as "Hypertext on Hypertext", which Tim saw, and years later Tim told Ben that it influenced him to make the links blue. Here is some email between Ben Shneiderman and Mark Andreessen about it that I posted to the Internet History mailing list archive with their permission: https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-April/005961.html https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri... Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988 - Ben demonstrating HyperTIES with blue hyperlinks, the system that influenced Tim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg And a couple of relevant papers: Embedded menus: Selecting Items in Context; Larry Koved and Ben Shneiderman; Communications of the ACM, Computing Practices, April 1986, Volume 29, Number 4, p. 312-318: https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menues-CACM-4-1986.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menue... An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia; John Ewing, Simin Mehrabanzad, Scott Sheck, Dan Ostroff and Ben Shneiderman; International Journal of Man Machine Studies (1986) 24, p. 29-45: https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-arrowkeys-IJMMS-1986-01-published.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-ar...

rappatic 1y ago

Intuitively it makes a lot of sense. Red is obviously associated with “bad/stop/destructive” and green with “positive/go” while blue is neutral in this respect. The other colors aren’t primary and they have their own problems: orange is too similar to red and yellow is too hard to make out against a white background. Purple is okay which is why it’s used for “visited” links but it’s much less ubiquitous than blue in everyday life which makes it gaudy/distinctive.

ghssds 1y ago

Microsoft's EDIT, QBASIC, QuickBASIC and MSDOS 6.x had on-screen help in the form of hypertext documents with white links inside green brackets on a black background. It looked good. Windows 3.1x also had on-screen help in the form of hypertext documents with underlined green links on a white background. It also looked good. They cherry-picked their examples by talking about Windows 3.1 without mentioning that. First time I experienced the world wide web, it was using NCSA Mosaic and it featured blue hyperlinks instead of green, which was a surprise.

drob518 1y ago

I suspect it’s for the same reason that the two most popular pen colors are black and blue. On light backgrounds, blue shows up well and doesn’t impede readability. So, if all your text is black by default and you want another default color that is also readable, blue’s an obvious choice. Add underlines for users working in grayscale environments.

ivankelly 1y ago

They’re blue because pmarca was a democrat back then

agiacalone 1y ago

I’m pretty sure that Gopher was only “Green on Black” because many of the terminals used to display them (ie. DEC’s VT220) used green phosphors. If you had a white phosphor terminal, it would have been White on Black.

yzydserd 1y ago

No mention of the Amiga? Amiga Guide is a hypertext format, first released around 1992 with Workbench 2.1 I think, with Blue highlighting, again if memory serves, inherited from the OS theme.