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August 27, 2021 07:22 pm

Why Are Hyperlinks Blue?

Elise Blanchard, writing on Mozilla blog: [...] What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one knows, but I have some theories. I often hear that blue was chosen as the hyperlink color for color contrast. Well, even though the W3C wasn't created until 1994, and so the standards for which we judge web accessibility weren't yet defined, if we look at the contrast between black as a text color, and blue as a link color, there is a contrast ratio of 2.3:1, which would not pass as enough color contrast between the blue hyperlink and the black text. Instead, I like to imagine that Cello and Mosaic were both inspired by the same trends happening in user interface design at the time. My theory is that Windows 3.1 had just come out a few months before the beginning of both projects, and this interface was the first to use blue prominently as a selection color, paving the way for blue to be used as a hyperlink color. Additionally, we know that Mosaic was inspired by ViolaWWW, and kept the same gray background and black text that they used for their interface. Reviewing Mosaic's release notes, we see in release 0.7 black text with underlines appearing as the preferred way of conveying hyperlinks, and we can infer that was still the case until something happened around mid April right before when blue hyperlinks made their appearance in release 0.13. In fact, conveying links as black text with underlines had been the standard since 1985 with Microsoft 1, which some once claimed Microsoft had stolen from Apple's Lisa's look and feel. I think the real reason why we have blue hyperlinks is simply because color monitors were becoming more popular around this time. Mosaic as a product also became popular, and blue hyperlinks went along for the ride. Mosaic came out during an important time where support for color monitors was shifting; the standard was for hyperlinks to use black text with some sort of underline, hover state or border. Mosaic chose to use blue, and they chose to port their browser for multiple operating systems. This helped Mosaic become the standard browser for internet use, and helped solidify its user interface as the default language for interacting with the web.

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