Zooiblog

That was fun!

Alright, so that’s it. I’m an alleged spammer if I must believe my host. TextDrive, here I come!

Posted on 2005-03-08 at tea time!

Underlines and italics

I’m a typophile. I also like standard semantics. Take for example this: “links should be recognisable as links”. I don’t like kicking dead horses, but Jeff made me.

A bit of history for ya, kids

Many of you should know by now that the underline is one of the last, most-used typewriter remnants. In lieu of putting a special italic letterset on the apparatus, you would just make clear that a part is italicised by putting a line under it. Because that also didn’t work out best, they figured: “why not put the beginning and end of the line on both sides?” That’s where we got the _underline_ by underscores from. Correct me if I’m wrong, though. This is what I was told :)

Dude, sod history. I live now!

Alright alright. The underline became an identifier for a ‘hyperlink’, and the perceived semantics of “it’s italic when underlined” got killed.

Then, Jeff showed up with his silly suggestion. Why not make links italic? Well, some simple reasons:

1. Screen italics can be totally illegible. We don’t want that.
2. How about italics with semantic meaning? Like emphasis?
3. The underlining of links has no connection to the underline due to lack of italics anymore.

There. Dead horse should be one nasty corpse by now.

Posted on 2005-03-05 at tea time!