Towards a more perfect link underline(acusti.ca) |
Towards a more perfect link underline(acusti.ca) |
It breaks the assumption (wrong word? Intuitive guess?) that one underline == one link.
Which means that every time I look at the link I do a doubletake trying to figure out why there are 6+ links in that word.
As HN does not support markup I'll attempt to demonstrate with underlines. Imagine that each slice seperated by underlines is a seperate link.
_Su_p_ercalifra_g_alisticex_p_ialdocious_
Worth noting that a continuous line can hide several links. The security conscious that likes to hover links before clicking them know this well, hence I always appreciate the use of a css :hover that would also somewhat attenuate that problem. (http://jsfiddle.net/46qvv6kn/)
The following is from what I call my "unstyled" CSS -- I'll apply it to bare-bones HTML websites.
a {
color: #1e6b8c;
text-decoration: none;
transition-property: color, background-color;
transition-duration: 0.3s;
transition-timing-function: linear;
transition-delay: 0.1s;
}
a:visited {
color: #6f32ad;
}
a:hover {
text-decoration: underline;
background: #f0f0ff;
}
a:active {
background-color: #427fed;
color: #fffff6;
}[0] http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201004/whenever_you_us...
see examples http://www.wired.com/2014/11/2014-physics-gift-guide/
However, as a style for links, it has a sufficiently different style that I find it distracting, both from . appearing far too faint to stand out, and from introducing breaks in the line. It isn't nearly as bad as sites that hide link underlines entirely, however.
The whole premise of this paper about Buridan's ass principle is wrong. That is to say, its assumption of continuity. A simple strategy of "always go to the right after you haven't made a firm decision after X time" leads to a discontinuous function, violating their assumption. It is trivially possible for strategies to lead to discontinuous decision functions, undermining the whole idea.
The author tries to report that "you aren't sure if you've decided or not after X time", but doesn't go very deeply into it, and clings to the assumption of continuity. In fact, one can always be sure whether they've made a FIRM decision or not by a certain time, in the same way the author has X_t(1) = 1 for all t.
My personal website is a playground for ideas; it is not a product anyone payed me to build, and it is not intended to sell anything. The fixed semi-transparent nav is an attempt to balance my annoyance with fixed navs that break page down/page up functionality with the utility of having quick access to useful links (use case being “interesting post, who is this person?” or “what else have they done?”). I don’t love it, and it’s pretty bad at mobile widths, but it has the distinct advantage of preventing readers from losing their place when paging. Another commenter picked up on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8679336
Anyways, I appreciate the criticism. Though I heartily disagree that as a result of that expirement, I cannot write about improving text underlining on the web.
If your intention was to be helpful in any way (always a safe assumption with username223), you could have at least said what browser you use.
In a half-hearted attempt to atone for my sins...
My browser is Safari blocking some JavaScript and most ads. Your floating header-menu-thingy is completely transparent, but won't disappear. Floating headers generally break page-down, so they're a terrible idea. But if you use them, at least make them opaque so people can figure out the breakage.
I really like the selection color-change, but I'm not sold on the actual CSS :/
It's too bad line-height doesn't work so great, because that feels like a great solution.
I really need to vacuum my car, but maybe I should hold off until we resolve the Ebola outbreak?
EDIT: But sure, the fact that there are other things to do doesn't mean no one should worry about anything else. I just feel like this is one of those things that doesn't really make any meaningful change, add any value, etc. Like I said, just seems like nit-picking. To each their own.
If you'll apply those styles to a page, you'll find that:
* Links are colored. Blue colorblindness is quite rare. That's arguably a far better choice than the orange/red links I'm seeing more frequently now. For myself, I find underlines distracting.
* On hover they're underlined and the background cover shifts.
* On click, foreground and background colors are inverted.
Your point on :focus vs. :hover is probably well-taken, though those have been equivalent for my use.
I've encountered a number of sites with disappearing sub-menus (themselves an arguably broken UI element), where the rule for visibility is :hover of the/a parent element. Which means that when the pointer moves off the parent and onto the submenu, the submenu disappears. LinkedIn has been exhibiting this recently.
I have no idea why you think i_f, r_a, c_e, or almost any of the other pairs of letters in your example would have a discontinuous underline.
They are saying that currently if there is a break in the underline it is understood that the two underlined portions of the word are two different links.
I'm not the article author or site creator, I'm just OCD about the myriad ways a seemingly simple page can fail to render.
