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A lesson in usability
One of my readers reported a usability problem with my site: he couldn't see
one of the links since I was using a rather dark blue to denote unvisited
links and he couldn't see distinguish it from the black text (and I suppose,
he had turned off underlining on links).
He also said that the typical color for unvisited links should be red, or
some other visually outstanding color, to draw attention to them for the
reader. My original idea was to have the visually outstanding color for links
visited since you, the reader, found the link worthy of visiting.
But, given the visual problems mentioned above, I decided to switch the two
colors so now unvisited links will be inviting you to click on them in red,
while those tired, old, visited links will now be in blue.
Now, while I'm talking about linking colors, I'm not sure how many of you may
have noticed, but the brightness of the links is an indication of how “far”
the link is—the brighter it is, the “closer” it is serverwise. That is, the
brightest links are to links to other entries in my journal here, while the
dimmest links are completely external to my site.
Of course, you can only see it if your browser supports style sheets. And
speaking of style sheets … I was expecting to have to fix about a dozen pages
to fix the color aspects of the links, but for some reason it slipped my mind
that I'm using a style sheet and that all that information about link color
is stored in one location so it only took me like fifteen seconds to fix
every page here (or rather, on The Boston Diaries [1]—my main home page [2]
doesn't use style sheets, so there, I have to fix about a hundred pages).
Score another point for style sheets.
[1]
https://boston.conman.org/
[2]
http://www.conman.org/people/spc/
Email author at
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