Should Links Be Obtrusive?
Like many other aspects of linking, the appearance of links creates both opportunities and problems. George Landow points out, "In both the WWW and DynaText documents the reader encounters distracting markup intruding into the text. Experience with these systems quickly convinces one of the need for a means of easily turning on and off such link indicators"(15). Similarly, in 1997, Jeffrey Veen lamented, "Those little blue scars [. . .] are a visual challenge, filling carefully designed pages with clutter and distraction, pulling your reader's attention. And without even realizing it, you're leading people away from your site after you've worked so hard to get them there" (107-8).
CSS does provide a way to "turn off" link appearance with the a:hover property. In combination with the a:link property (for unvisited links) and the a:visited property (for visited links), the a:hover property will activate presentation values such as color or underlining only when a cursor passes over the link. The format on a style sheet would be as follows:
a:hover{color:red;text-decoration:underline;}
However, although it is now possible to activate link formatting only when the user's cursor passes across the link, there are, again, issues of usability and control. Jakob Nielsen argues strongly against altering any of the standard link specifications: "When non-standard link colors are used, users lose the ability to clearly see which parts of the site they have already visited and which parts remain to be explored. The user's sense of structure and location in the site is weakened, and navigational usability suffers as a result" (62-63). Similarly, removing link identifiers may help to make content more readable, but it also diminishes the user's ability to move freely among texts. Again, students can be asked to consider the effect of their choices; is there sufficient justification for altering the usual, albeit imperfect, system of link identification?
Citation Format:
Batschelet, Margaret. "Learning To Love the Code: HTML As a Tool in the Writing Classroom." The Writing Instructor. 2004. http://www.writinginstructor.org/files/batschelet/
(Date Accessed).
Review Process: Margaret Batschelet's
hypertext was accepted for publication following blind, peer review.