RadioRadio
Wednesday, January 8, 2003[3:08:26 PM]
Underlining links was a *seriously* primitive choice for html. Underlining reduces readability, even if it adds emphasis. So your eye is attracted to the spot, but the text is difficult to read.
CSS provides more options. Try: border-bottom: 1px; text-decoration: none. That also lets you get away from coloring the link text. You might want to add emphasis to a link by coloring it, but a lot of times there's no need. You can leave the text color alone, and just color the bottom border.
If you add pretty good line-height to make your text more readable, then you can afford a little padding, so there's some whitespace between the bottom of descenders ("gpqy") and the border. If you choose a border color that is lighter than the text, you probably have less need of extra padding.
If you're worried that the border by itself doesn't add enough emphasis, try making it two pixels.
I've been playing with this for a couple of days. Today I ran across this site, with a pleasant gray background, and a darker gray border for links.
[2:51:07 PM]
One of the worst CSS tricks: set body text-align: center, and then a width for the content div. Anyone whose browser window isn't as wide as your div won't be able to see the whole page, won't even be able to scroll to read the part hidden *to the left* of the viewable area. (In Mozilla, at least.)
Don't *do* this!
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Last update: 9/20/03; 2:54:13 PM.