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I am experimenting again on my personal web with making hyperlinks less visible, such as not to interfere with the reading experience too much. I had made them invisible before some time ago, but then turned back to default later.
But my experimenting shows me first and foremost that I don’t properly understand the CSS options I have and how to control them.
For instance currently I have the following simple CSS code in my web
a.existingWikiWord[title] {
border: 0px;
color: #000000;
}
a.existingWikiWord, a.newWikiWord {
color: #000500;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:hover.existingWikiWord, a:hover.newWikiWord {
color: #000000
}
a:hover.existingWikiWord[title] {
color: #000000;
}
a:visited.existingWikiWord {
color: #000000;
}
On the page differential cohomology in a cohesive topos (schreiber) I am checking the effects this has. Some observations:
the highlighting of the href-links and of the internal anchor links is not affected. What are the commands for these?
there is highlighting of links when moused over. But in a weird way, not sure if I did affect that and how. What’s the command for controlling the appearance of a link when hovering the mouse pointer over it? Apparently it’s not the “a:hover”-command above?
A shade of green around RGB hexadecimal #009000 - #00A000 is pretty grey on my screen …
(maybe it’s just that I have a bad screen on my webbook. It is intentionally non-brilliant, ’cause I can’t stand that when working on text)
… and links colored this way are visible but don’t affect the visual impression of the text as a whole a lot. It seems to me.
Your links are invisible to me until moused over, except for links to pages that I’ve already read: those are green.
Just a quick note to say that I find using one of the CSS-modifier extensions for firefox invaluable for this sort of thing (I use firebug myself, but that can do more than just modify CSS so a more focussed CSS editor may be easier to use). It can also help you to find what classes (if any) affect given elements. You may find that ordinary href and anchor commands are just that: ordinary a tags.
I think that the syntax for the ’hover’ should be: a.newWikiWord:hover (similarly for the visited one).
As well as the canonical specification at http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ I also find the explanations at http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp quite useful.
Experimenting with CSS styles and personally restyling web pages is really easy in Firefox using the Stylish extension. You don’t have to set up a private web and and you can make style changes and see them with just a few keystrokes and a button click - you don’t have to reload anything.
Here is one example text that can become a Stylish rule:
@-moz-document domain("ncatlab.org") {
a:hover {background-color: orange !important;}
a.existingWikiWord {
color: black !important;
text-decoration: none !important;
background-color: rgb(255,222,220);}
}
Stylish rules are really patches to a page’s CSS so you may need to stick in some ’!important’s which may not be needed if the rules become part of the page’s CSS. The Firebug extension is quite useful in examining how CSS rules interact to give the final computed style - though since Firebug is so rich it may take a while to learn how to use it just for examining CSS. You can also play with changing CSS with Firebug, but one advantage of Stylish is that it saves your changes as a rule that gets reapplied every time a page in the domain is loaded.
Your links are invisible to me until moused over, except for links to pages that I’ve already read: those are green.
Toby, could you do me a favor and check that again? Because I think I had it coded that way first for a few minutes and then changed it.
Hm, maybe I am using the wrong syntax for the “visited”-version. What’s the right syntax to set color of visited links?
I have
a:visited.existingWikiWord {
color: #009000;
text-decoration: none;
}
But apparently that’s not recognized.
[edit: it is being recognized! Isn’t it? Can you see visited links highlighted in green on my web? ]
H’m, my report in #3 was naive, so ignore it. This is what I see now:
So all links are visible (to me with Firefox on Windows) except for unvisited links to the main nLab when my mouse pointer is elsewhere.
By the way, instead of coding for existingWikiWord and the like, you can also ask the CSS to look at the URI and do things based on whether it has (for example) ncatlab or mathforge in it. Then links to particular sections could be treated the same way as links to entire pages, or at least have something done to them.
Thanks, Toby.
Hm, I have been playing around with the code, but different to from what I’d expect of a computer program code, there is not always direct correlation between what I type and what effect it has.
The varied behaviour you observe above, is induced by this rather homogeneous code
a.existingWikiWord {
color: #009000;
text-decoration: none;
}
a.visited.existingWikiWord {
color: #009000;
text-decoration: none;
}
a.newWikiWord {
color: #009000;
text-decoration: none;
}
a.existingWikiWord:hover {
color: #009000;
background-color: #FFFFFF;
text-decoration: underline;
}
a.visited.existingWikiWord:hover {
color: #009000;
background-color: #FFFFFF;
text-decoration: underline;
}
a.newWikiWord:hover {
color: #009000;
background-color: #FFFFFF;
text-decoration: underline;
}
I would simply want every single link to be a shade of green on white and become underlined when moused over. What do I have to do?
ah, it must be
a.existingWikiWord:visited
instead of what I had above
Ah, that’s what Andrew said! :-)
Rod wrote:
a:hover {background-color: orange !important;}
Is this supposed to specify the hover-behaviour for all links whatsoever? I have tried to include this line, but I can’t see it having any effect.
Right now I have pretty much all the links come out the way I want, except that links of the form
[[nLab:some page]]
to non-visited pages don’t show my chosen background color when hovered over. They do however display as desired without hovering. Which is strange, because I am not aware that I have coded that either.
Allright, as a test, I have implemented this color scheme for links on the main Lab.
Currently you should see all hyperlinks non-underlined until hovered over by the mouse but instead text-colored in some shade of green.
The shade of green here is supposed to be visisbly different from the rest of the text, but only slightly so. Let me know how it looks on your system and whether it needs to be more or less distinct from the surrounding text.
I can see the links indicated by green text fine. If this becomes permanent I will probably run something like the following Stylish rule so I can distinguish between nLab links that I have :visited or not.
@-moz-document domain("ncatlab.org") {
a.existingWikiWord {
color: black !important;
text-decoration: none !important;
background-color: rgb(255,222,200);}
a.existingWikiWord:visited {background-color: rgb(200,255,222) !important;}
a.existingWikiWord:hover {background-color: orange !important;}
}
(above order of :hover after :visited is important)
One of the arguments for displaying links with an underline is that they are visually distinguishable for people who are color blind. With no data to back up my opinion, I think indicating links with a :background-color would be easier on the color blind than indicating them with a different font :color.
Allright, as a test, I have implemented this color scheme for links on the main Lab.
This is what doriath is for!
Allright, as a test, I have implemented this color scheme for links on the main nLab.
This is what doriath is for!
Allright, but in the other thread there seemed to have been general agreement that the strongly highlighted underlined hyperlinks on the Lab pages we have/had are/werer a visual desastater . In the face of desaster on the Lab, I think some action is required.
There also was also a consensus in this thread, it seems, to make links as non-highlighted as possible without making them unrecognizable.
So something needs/needed to be done , I think. Andrew hesitated to do it:
The main issue for me is a lack of imagination and an unwillingness to spend ages doing little tweaks followed by huge arguments while everyone disagrees over the exact shade of blue
So now I took action. We don’t want to leave the lab knowingly in a desastrous state while going about our hobby of having long discussions. But we can still have these discussions, of course.
I don’t see anything different on the main nLab or Doriath; did it get reverted?
Ditto. It was green with no underline for me yesterday, but today it’s back to underlines.
Allright, but in the other thread there seemed to have been general agreement that the strongly highlighted underlined hyperlinks on the Lab pages we have/had are/werer a visual desastater .
No, in the cited comment, Tom wrote (and general agreement followed) this:
If every occurrence of “category” or “space” or “object” is highlighted then it’ll be a visual disaster.
I sure hope that we’re not going to start doing this on the regular nLab! (Sometimes you link things a little more often than I would, but never close to every time.)
In contrast, this was in a discussion about doing just that in nPub, which is not the same thing.
However, I now see that you were not just performing a test but actually trying to fix what you perceived to be a problem. While I don’t see the problem, I agree that you don’t have to stick to doriath when actually fixing things.
I had reverted the change yesterday, when I started to feel that I was missing the former look of the Lab, after all.
I am probably being ridiculous, sorry. We should have a public vote. On my personal web you can still see (in case it matters) the color scheme where all linked words are shaded green and become underlined when hovered over by the mouse. I thought it was good to see this in action. But I am not sure, my esthetic senses may be tricking me. You decide.
For what it is worth, I like the way the nLab looks.
Any comments from me about visible/invisible links is more about the nJournal. I think the nJournal should look more journal-ish. The wiki can look wiki-ish. No problem.
For now I find the present way pretty good. But it is good to experiment, and have possibly better options riping for future.
I do want people to experiment, with personal webs or with doriath. Then people can propose changes to the main lab, and simply implement changes on their personal webs.
Personally, I do like the current nLab look better than Urs’s scheme, but I wouldn’t mind being outvoted on that. (Although it doesn’t look like I am.)
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