Re: The `link' face.

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 16:15, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> I don't like much the new appearance of links in blue.
> I understand the motivation behind it, but:
> - it's louder (and I find it more ugly) than before, yet no-one
>  complained about it being "unclear".
> - it begs the question "what's the intended difference between the button
>  and the link faces".
> - 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
> "underline" without any blue, so it would leave the appearance mostly
> unchanged compared to Emacs-23).

Different people react differently to colors and form just because
people are different. However there is also a habituation. In the case
of habituation I believe the web is far more important for most people
than Emacs itself. The standard on the web seems to be
underline+different color. But the color does not have to be very
different, just slightly different will probably make most people
quickly see where the links are because that is how it looks mostly on
the web today.

I think the "blue (or other different color) with an underline for
mouse highlighting" that are used by some designers have been found to
be less efficient and is regarded as a bad accessability choice. (In
some contexts, like a table of content it is not bad, but do we have
such context in Emacs?)