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I think hyperlinks killed the underline. Underline was pretty popular when I was younger. We'd underline the dates in our exercise books, it was used for empha
by oniony 1y ago
I think hyperlinks killed the underline.
Underline was pretty popular when I was younger. We'd underline the dates in our exercise books, it was used for emphasis in textbooks, &c. But when hyperlinks adopted underline as the default style then nobody would use them for anything else any more, as otherwise you'd have people clicking on things thinking they were links when they weren't. I'm guessing that's when people decided to render _this_ as italic rather than underline, perhaps web based IRC clients started it.
But then everyone stopped rendering links with underlines, so it died in vain. (I suppose it /is/ still used as a hover effect sometimes, inconsistently.)
And now nobody really uses underline for anything at all. It's kinda dormant waiting for its renaissance.
- dspillett 1y agoUnderline was already reducing in use away from handwritten work (I still use it on handwritten notes today, as I think do many people), before hyperlinks were a common UX element outside of academia. It was common on typewritten works mainly because it was easy and reliable - just backspace and press the underscore key. Italics were not an option on typewriters and other daisy based printers and bold wasn't as easy (to get a good result you needed to go back multiple times), at least not without an electronic typewriter (which often automated underline and bold). With word processors and dot-matrix printers (even on some electronic typewriters) bold (sometimes multiple levels of bold) and italic became more practical, as did changing font size for titles, so we had more options and people increasingly preferred others over underlining.