Re: The `link' face.

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> - it begs the question "what's the intended difference between the button
>> and the link faces".

I'd like to hear what people think about this issue.

>> - while the "blue underlined" might be considered "the standard link
>> appearance", when I look at web pages in my browser (with default
>> config), I see that old-style plain pages indeed use "blue underlined"
>> (and even bold for debbugs), whereas more modern designs
>> (e.g. wikipedia and many more) use something more subdued such as just
>> "blue with an underline for mouse highlighting", or even "nothing +
>> mouse highlighting" when the context makes it clear that it's a link
>> (e.g. for tab-like thingies, or menus, ...).
>> So I'm tempted to change the `link' face by removing "blue" from it
>> (most of the links use button.el so they used to appear as just
> This doesn't quite follow from your wikipedia argument above.

It does in the sense if you ignore the examples and focus on the "more
subdued".

>> "underline" without any blue, so it would leave the appearance mostly
>> unchanged compared to Emacs-23).
> You have said here in the past that your personal preference is to not
> use colors for faces, but other attributes (bold/underline,etc).  Most
> users use colors, so it seems that your personal preference doesn't
> quite match what most people do, and this proposed change suits more
> your personal taste than anything else...

That's true, although in this case my motivation is also to just revert
to the old appearance.

AFAICT nobody complained about the appearance of those buttons, just
about the fact that the button face should inherit from the link face,
so there are two ways to address the issue:
- just inherit from link and hence change the appearance (what we have now).
- inherit from link but also change link to what button used to be so as
  not to change the appearance.

IIUC in web-design, different faces are used for different links mostly
based on things like:
- if context makes it clear that you can click on it, use something very
  subdued or even nothing at all (usually this is for menus and tabs
  which already have a different appearance).
- if it's for links within some text and there might be many such links
  on words which aren't syntactically meant to be links (e.g. wikis),
  then use something subdued that tries not to render the text difficult
  to read.
Also, I have the impression that as the notion of "hypertext" has become
mainstream, links have become more discrete since you don't need them to
be loud for people to find them, now that people know to expect
them pretty much everywhere.
  

        Stefan