[WikiEN-l] CSS and underlined links

Sun Jun 12 17:14:59 UTC 2005

On 11/06/05, sannse <sannse at tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> We had an email asking why we override browser defaults to underline
> links.  I've asked about this at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Monobook.css , but am not
> sure how much that is watched.  Any comments would be most helpful there.

As I understand it:
* some people voted, a long time ago, to keep underlines (or, rather,
"use browser default") -
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Link_style_vote

* when 1.3 came out, with the spangly new MonoBook skin, it included
non-underlined links, and people complained -
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.3_comments_and_bug_reports/Archive#Underlining_of_links

* the skin as distributed with the software still has them
non-underlined by default (underline on hover), and indeed most
Wikimedia projects leave them as such, but "by popular demand", the
English Wikipedia overrides this in its global stylesheet

Whether that makes it the *right* thing to do, I've no idea. 

[On a technical note, I can't quite work out how the user preference
toggle for this works, but it might be cleaner to have this set as a
default preference rather than explicit in the stylesheet]

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]