Brion-
I thought you were going to bed :-)
> Underlining:
We should just get rid of this option and not specify
anything about
underlining in our style sheet. Every browser has an option to set
this, and people turn underlining off in the site just because we
override their browser settings.
Most people are not even aware of this browser setting, and even if they
are, it is useful to be able to set it on a per-site basis, for the
following reasons:
1) If a site sets the link color, but not the link style, that means the
browser setting is not overridden (at least in Mozi). So if a site decides
to use black underlined text for its links, this would then become black
non-underlined text. This is one reason to have this option turned on in
general, but for specific sites/themes, a user may wish to turn it off. I
for one would be very displeased if I would have to turn off underlining
for all websites just to view Wikipedia in non-underlined text.
2) Our site is a particularly link-intensive one. The main page alone
includes 127 links. Underlined text is ugly and hard on the eyes (which is
why it is almost never used in print), but with just a few links, easy to
locate on the page. It is quite obvious that the higher the link/text
ratio, the bigger the negative impact of underlined links. Most users who
surf with the default setting (the vast majority) will probably prefer
surfing Wikipedia without underlined links.
Of the options in preferences, "underline" is the one which our users
disable most often ("rememberpassword" doesn't count because it's also
on
a different screen). I think it would be a good idea to change the
default.
Regards,
Erik