I know what you’re thinking and, no, it’s not that easy.
I have a page, http://www.sixdegreesofnothing.com/index2.shtml, which I wish to redesign with two sets of link colors. One set is for the links in the actual text (I believe a/v/link colors are all shades of blue), and another set for the navigation bar on the left side, which I want to change to text-links-that-resemble-buttons instead of text graphics which are so…yesterday.
Keep in mind that I want the text links to change color on mouseover, so sticking font tags inside the anchor tags won’t cut it. I have the feeling that there’s a CSS attribute that’ll do what I want, but I can’t remember what it is (assuming it even exists).
Be sure to put those in a file called whatever.css and upload it to your disk space. Then put a link to it in the <head></head> tags of your page. (You can also {STYLE} rigth in the HEAD but I like doing it this way better.) If you want to see how to do that, look at the HTML on any of my pages. (I forget off the top of my head.)
You can also look through my HTML to see how the “class=X” works. I don’t use it for links, but I do for paragraph styles. It makes the HTML much cleaner and the appearance of the page more consistent between different browsers.
Sweet, it works great in MSIE and only slightly less great in Netscape 4.7.
I’m not sure if it’s my implementation or simply another example of Netscape’s not-so-great CSS support, but you can check my stylesheet at http://www.sixdegreesofnothing.com/style.css, and needless to say, my navbar links all have the style=“nav” attribute in them (I used nav instead of menu).
Well, if it’s possible to fix it for NS, then so be it. If not, odds are I’ll continue my policy of not caring too much about minor Netscape issues and go with it anyway.
None of these link color settings will have any effect on me. I have that stuff turned off in my browser (set to use my colors, not the web pages).
Why? Because the web designer is not supposed to muck with these colors anyway. It just confuses the user. You have to think of all such settings (including attempts to format paragraphs certain ways) as inherently poor html. These are all user choices, not author choices.
Give it up, leave it alone. Just a bad idea from an HCI point of view. Your are just going to annoy your audience which is never a good idea.
jw, nice site, cool artwork. As an aside, I’m fairly sure you can actually link to your site (using the URL vB tag) w/out the mods getting mad at you. I mean, it’s not as if you have porn on your site. Speaking of which, what’s up with that?
ftg, what if I have a background colour that closely matches one of the default link colours? That’s the bestest reason for defining my own link colours - not to mention we arty types just looooove to have fun with rainbow colours to dazzle and delight
I love spelling ‘colours’ the correct way, can you tell?
From a purely functional point of view, ftg is entirely right. If people expect links to look a certain way (blue and underlined) then using non-standard link colours may confuse them (adding a ‘cognitive overhead’ to their tasks).
On the other hand, the web isn’t a purely functional medium. Not every website needs to be task-oriented, and not every website needs to be designed for absolute web novices. As long as your links are distinctive and consistent throughout the site, I don’t think there’s a huge problem in using different colours.
They should also be appropriately labelled and stand out in the overall design (for more on this, see Kevin Larson & Mary Czerwinski, Web Page Design: Implications of Memory, Structure and Scent for Information Retrieval, 1998: http://research.microsoft.com/ui/papers/chi984.doc)
A. For KKBattousai, of course I’m not facetious. I am assuming that i. you are, or ii. you are a novice at HCI and html. Also, quoting someone else’s entire post with refering to any specific detail is poor formatting.
B. For GuanoLad, If the background image causes a problem, I can of course turn that off too in a jif. But 99.9999% of the time I’ll just go somewhere else. And that is the worst thing that a user can do on a web site.
C. For Crusoe, I am not a novice. A novice wouldn’t even know that you can set your own link colors. Installed my first web server, wrote html and cgi-bin scripts way back in '94. Some of my research results are used to run the web.
Every web page designer has to always be aware that the user could be:
Using a handheld PC. (Low pixel resolution.)
Using Lynx. (Even with my cable modem, it’s still amazingly faster.)
Blind, deaf or otherwise impaired (thus another reason to use Lynx).
Have image loading and most plug-ins turned off.
Using those Japanese computers that use Intel chips but aren’t WinTel compatible (so no IE). (There’s a huge number of those.)
Then there’s Konqueror, Mozilla, and Mosaic still works too.
So, KKBattousai, after all that time you spent tweaking your web pages and who knows how many viewers are going to even see the changes. The user is in charge of how they’ll view the details of your page, not you. You have better things to do with your time.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to dismiss usability factors, and I’m certainly not trying to paint you as a novice. I’m only pointing out that it is possible to over-emphasise them: for example, the importance of designing for multiple devices and audio/text browsers depends on who your audience is and how much you value that part of it. I may not have your level of experience, but I’ve seen enough research to guess that consensus varies on the ‘optimum’ level of usability for a site.
There’s good and there’s bad. An animation that plays automatically when you start at a company’s home page and have to click to get around is a classic example of bad web design (though still has a ways to go to catch up with frames). If you want to have a button that says: “click here to see some animation”, okay with me. I love graphic imagery and so it depresses me greatly to see the web almost totally devoid of useful graphics. Flash is just getting a harsh reputation as the perfect way to do things badly. The bad tends to drive out the good.
I have had so many conversations with clueless web page designers. Eventually I bring up blind, etc., users and the reaction I get has been uniformly appalling. No other word for it.
And for the other 99.99% of us, I daresay that most of us agree that you should stop trying to impose your silliness feining morality on us.
How dare you tell web designers to do something they don’t want to do, and their users don’t want them to do. Shame on you.
KKBattousai wrote
Unfortunately no. At least not in NS4. NS6 supports hover, though. It’s a shame; NS was pretty rocking at one point. Now they’re almost irrelevant. It’s a shame they won’t become completely irrelevant any time soon, so support is still needed.
ftg what if you have a black background on your navigation and your text is all on a white table? According to your reasoning, the nav stuff can’t be graphical buttons because text is better in all those situations. So it has to be bright links. And in the table, it has to be dark links.
As for your “why don’t you ever think of these guys?” stats, any good web programmer should also know the stats of his/her users and what kind of browsers, OS and resolutions are hitting the site (even if they hit and run). There is no use in making the page look like crap for 99% of your users just appease the 1%. I’d rather you didn’t visit my site if you’re going to be that picky. If all were to adhere to your rules, then there would be no need for web designers, just *nix coders with a bad attitude and some spare minutes.
There are a standard set of rules for deaf and blind compatability (mostly enforced on government-sponsored sites), and having dual link colors has nothing to do with it. it’s all in how their web browsing-to-voice readers can read it.
Okay, thanks for answering that. Personally, I don’t think things don’t look too bad even in NS4. So the colors don’t change, no big deal, IMHO. And, feh, you think that’s bad, until recently, the company I worked at insisted on NS3 support.
