In 1990 NeXT released the NeXTstation Color. There are screenshots online of WorldWideWeb.app running on the NextStation Color, and the hyperlinks are all blue. It's true that Tim Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb.app on monochrome NeXT cubes, but it seems reasonable that the default underlining he used (in the Text object) may have been blue when displayed in color.
Very strange that this article didn't bother to even consider or investigate this, simply dismissing the NeXT as monochrome.
Those screenshots are from 1993 ("This is a (242kB) screen shot of the browser, taken when things had got to the point that Communications of the ACM was interested in an article, in 1993."[1]), which matches the year the blog post settled upon for when blue links appeared, but that still doesn't answer why they are blue.
Can you find a screenshot definitively from before 1993 that shows blue hyperlinks?
Q: I'm a student of visual communications and asked myself why links are blue. I found some answers that might be, for example blue is a color of learning, but I'm not sure what is right. Is there any reason, why links are colored blue ?
A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn't used much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went color - I don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of course with CSS style sheets. There are many examples of style sheets which use different colors.
My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green.
One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena" browser which had a textured parchment background and embossed out the words of the link with a square apparently raised area.
I believe this is the correct answer. It was the default for Netscape navigator back in early 90s. If you wrote an html page without styles it gave you a white background, blue hyperlinks, and times new roman font. As for why the default for NN was blue, I really don’t know other than the juxtaposition of it vs normal text. To claim it was mosaic would align with my history of it with NN though.
Blue is the least dense rod cell, so shows up best against white over any other color. Green is the most dense rod cell, so shows up best against black.
This is why Apple makes Android users have white on green text, the least readable choice.
Given the author's "conclusions" about Windows's influence here, it's probably worth mentioning that Windows 3.x (including both 3.0 and 3.1) used green for hyperlinks in its help system by default (which was hypertext but not HTML): https://i.imgur.com/ZjX5xIW.png
Green hyperlinks stuck around in the Windows 95 help system, and were eventually replaced when Windows 98 switched to Microsoft's new HTML Help system which defaulted to blue hyperlinks (inherited from Internet Explorer).
I always assumed that the green help links color was intentionally differentiated from regular blue web links to clearly imply that they remain within the "Help" universe.
It's likely this person came across this during their research, but decided to omit it because it didn't fit in with their already weak and speculative narrative.
Mosaic was the first browser I used, and the first I wrote websites for (I still only test in one browser ;) ).
Something the article doesn't touch on is the fact that there wasn't really such a thing as hex colors like "#0000ff" back then. You could use them, but no one did because they weren't guaranteed to work properly. There was a list of 256 "web safe colors" that you could use that were the 8 bit palette that most computers supported in VGA graphics (at 640x480 resolution), and then a further list of HTML colors that could be used if the user had a graphics card that could use 16 bit SVGA graphics. Using 24 bit hex code colors didn't come along until a little later, when computers were likely to display them properly.
In other words, links weren't #0000ff. They were "blue".
One underappreciated aspect of paletted computers is that you couldn't just take the whole palette for yourself, you have to leave some colors for the OS and for the other applications running alongside you. Palette management gets really complicated when you have multiple applications trying to share one. Even though it takes three times as much video memory, you save considerable complexity when you go true color.
Yes, people did use the hex codes back then. You just had to take care that the ones you used were on the list of 216 (not 256) web safe colors. The VGA palette was programmable and supported up to 262,144 colors, but a standard set of 216 was used in browsers to allow Windows, Mac OS, and other programs color table slots with which to draw their standard colors.
I think some browsers understood X11 color names like "blue" or "DarkSlateGray", but there are more than 216 of those, so same caveat applies.
Around that time I brought a magazine to the web as a paid job and had endless discussions about the fact that the colors were "not accurate" and "not following CI".
My two cents: I think, it's mostly due to grey background color, text contrast and CRT rendering.
In reverse order:
* Not all colors lent themselves equally well to a CRT, especially to the more cost effective ones. Green, esp. when in multiple shades, didn't render well (or, the other way round, issues with green are more easily detected by the human eye), so you won't see much green in early color UIs (or rather bright single-color expressions in elements like bars).
* Also, CRT specific, you want to stick with primary colors (RGB), since even a small misalignment of the cathodes will result in blurry text in more evenly distributed hues. (Same is true for the outer regions of larger color CRTs with shadow masks.)
* Monitor calibration wasn't always the best, shades of grey often exhibited a red hue, esp. on systems with a gamma of 2.0.
* Considering what we have established, we are searching for a color which consists mostly of R, G, or B and renders well on an average color CRT on top of a grey background of #C0C0C0. (Also, mind that in 1993/4, we're probably not speaking of millions of colors to choose from, but rather more of a 4-bit color palette, if we're looking for robustness.)
- Green, as already established, is somewhat complicated. Also, a mostly green color of comparable intensity is perceived somewhat brighter than, say a blue one. It will stand out against black text, probably more than you want, and it's contrast ratio to a light grey suffering from a red tint isn't great.
- Red may not be the best choice either, as its contrast to grey isn't the best (ask your printer) – and its use may be best reserved for representing an active state. (There's also the cultural issue with red usually signifying limits or even off-limit areas, which isn't especially inviting.)
- Which leaves blue for a passive state, which is actually a good choice. It's perceived slightly darker than the other primary colors, which is favorable for rendering text, it has a good contrast against light grey, and isn't affected by any missalignments or color calibration issues (as it doesn't share with red), and, while visible, isn't too distracting in what is mostly black text (you still want to provide for fluent reading of a given text, even, if it embeds a link). Moreover, it is more friendly to impaired vision than green or red (which are actually used in diagnosing defective vision). Properties, for which it had been used as a favorite color in UIs already. Moreover, on the cultural side of things, where red indicates restriction, blue indicates recommendation and instruction (compare traffic signs).
This article is so strange, even though it is hosted by Mozilla. Here is straight from the horse’s mouth, I remember Tim Berners-Lee reminiscing about green links originally
A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn't used much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went color - I don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of course with CSS style sheets. There are many examples of style sheets which use different colors.
My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green.
One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena" browser which had a textured parchment background and embossed out the words of the link with a square apparently raised area.
One thing that's always bugged me about the HN interface is that visited links are basically the same color as the metadata below them. Makes it hard to just glance at a screen and see the stories you've already clicked on.
No, visited links are grey. That's the default. I've seen "new" stories appear that are grey links because they were popular weeks earlier and I had already read them. Maybe reset your defaults?
I'm a little surprised by some basic facts the article gets wrong.
- WorldWideWeb was not created in 1987. Tim Berners-Lee released it in December 1990, based on a proposal he developed in 1989 [1].
- Windows 1.0 in 1985 did not have hyperlinks. It also did not have overlapping windows. [2] That second screenshot is of Windows 2, (from December 1987) showing the "Help" system, which did use underlined hyperlinks, from 1989.
It makes me question the thoroughness of their research at all.
> What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one knows, but I have some theories. ... 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.
What? No! These are grad students working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the 1990s on big powerful Unix workstations [3]. I highly doubt the UI choices of Window 3 were relevant or closely watched by that team.
“ Gopher Protocol was created at the University of Minnesota for searching and retrieving documents. Its original design featured green text on a black background.”
They're also pretty seriously wrong about HyperCard:
> Apple brought color to its HyperCards, but notably, the text links were still black and not blue.
HyperCard never natively supported any form of "text links". You could make a button with a text label, or a transparent button hovering over text, but there was no way to attach a behavior to a span of styled text without a lot of custom scripting.
(And, for what it's worth, the color XCMD for HyperCard never really caught on. It was a late addition, and never felt entirely like a native part of the application. Even when it was available, most users kept on authoring stacks in black and white.)
> However, some UI elements did have blue accents when interacted upon
I have no idea what the author is referring to here. Possibly the blue tint in the system UI (like window titlebars), which has nothing to do with HyperCard and didn't apply to its in-app UI?
This article is poorly written, I was expecting an interesting investigation but stopped reading halfway through. Here's a bunch of underdescribed things with non-blue hyperlinks, and some completely unrelated ones that didn't even have hyperlinks. The answer to the headline could have been made in one sentence and there would have been no loss of value.
I'm quite sure that students, even grad students, at UIUC, had lots of access to windows based computers in 1993. Just because they weren't doing their work on them didn't mean they didn't have PCs running DOS or Windows (and maybe dual booting Linux).
> Windows 1.0 in 1985 did not have...overlapping windows.
Actually Windows 1.0 did have overlapping windows.
They just weren't the default style for application windows.
But there were popup windows that overlapped other windows on the screen. These were typically used for dialog and message boxes, for example the End Session message box midway through that filfre.net article.
There was nothing stopping anyone from using a popup-style window for their application, and adding a titlebar so you could move it around on the screen. It just wasn't the custom, and people would think your app was weird if it did that. And on a typical system of the day (no GPU!), dragging your window around on the screen would perform rather poorly.
The part about project xanadu is also shady. They list it as 1964, but first paper was published 1965, while their idea of hypertext was born 1960, with the word choosen 1963. Not sure where the 1964 comes from. Not to mention that this wasn't even an actual implementation. It's disputable whether xanadu really should be the first one to mention here. The ideas of referencing documents is older and has previous implementations in analog world. It they wanna go just about hypertext, they should at least started with memex.
WorldWideWeb was created by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
> Here Microsoft uses the “hyperlink blue” for active states when a user clicks on different drives, folders and icons.
Hyperlink blue was a much brighter blue (pure blue, on the interfaces I used, but I was a litter later in the timeline) than Window's blue, which was a (noticeably) darker blue.
So, is there somebody there who knows Marc Andreessen or Eric Bina and could aks one of them to confirm they choose blue because it looked good on white while red or green were obviously too much loaded ?
This looks simpler than listing a bunch of other UI, many non influential and none of them giving the answer.
this is the perfect example of how to write something wrong on internet, so you can get all the correct facts for free from strangers and you can write a correct article
Man what a weirdly speculative article. Is this what Mozilla employees are being paid to do these days?
It's basically a tour of old hyperlink and windowing systems... with lots of guessing and maybes. I'm not sure why it's relevant that Win 3.1 had blue titlebars, for instance. The author never actually answers her question but I imagine the obvious guess is the correct one:
Black text on a white background was the predominant GUI style at the time (probably due to Mac OS and Windows) and the software designers needed a visual cue that the hyperlink was clickable. Just underlined wouldn't have worked because underline was already a popular style in text processing. So they decided to give it a different color too. Blue is the most logical choice as it has good contrast against a white background, and has a neutral meaning (compared to say, red). There weren't really a lot of color choices back then, the largest palette you could count on at the time was 16 colors.
This was what Mosaic did and most browsers that came after it (including the most influential: Netscape) did what Mosaic did.
And there certainly were browsers of the era that didn't use blue underline for links, the next most common paradigm was some kind of bordered box around the text (usually the same color as the text).
Apparently the author has never used a monochrome interface if they think gopher is “green” and Linux (which has nothing to do with hyperlinks either) is “white”
The simplest explanation is that blue is the darkest of the primary colors (at full intensity, think 8/16-color palette) and hence has the best contrast on white or gray background (after black). It also helps that it isn’t a signalling color like red (important/error) and green (good/go).
Another curiosity related to this one is why <h5> and <h6> have smaller default font sizes than <p>, given that they are headers and should therefore "head" a section of text [1].
Interesting topic, for sure, but the info on what colors were used by "Gopher Protocol" and "Linux Kernel" are pretty silly. Those colors would vary by what real or emulated terminal somebody was using.
I would love if links to the same domain would have another color, so that you know if e.g. a news site just links to own content or the source, without clicking all the links in the articel.
I miss blue for links and purple for visited links. I think Google still does it (which is great for the nostalgic of the webs), but today links are mostly buttons/images and not text anymore.
I remember also, in the 90s, was quite popular yellow text against a black/dark blue background. The old days!
The fact that the :visited state of links was gimped due to privacy issues doesn't help much either.
It used to be any visited link would look visited, regardless of the website. This made it possible to see where a user had visited across the web, and so visited links only apply to the current origin now.
At some point it also became hip to remove the underline from links, and links rarely have underlines anymore.
[+] [-] SeanLuke|4 years ago|reply
Very strange that this article didn't bother to even consider or investigate this, simply dismissing the NeXT as monochrome.
See for example:
https://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb#/media/File:World...
[+] [-] js2|4 years ago|reply
Can you find a screenshot definitively from before 1993 that shows blue hyperlinks?
1. https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html
[+] [-] a-dub|4 years ago|reply
also was somewhat wondering if maybe the blue came from some sort of NeXT platform default. (grey #2 renders as blue on color machines or somesuch)
[+] [-] js2|4 years ago|reply
Q: I'm a student of visual communications and asked myself why links are blue. I found some answers that might be, for example blue is a color of learning, but I'm not sure what is right. Is there any reason, why links are colored blue ?
A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn't used much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went color - I don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of course with CSS style sheets. There are many examples of style sheets which use different colors.
My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green.
One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena" browser which had a textured parchment background and embossed out the words of the link with a square apparently raised area.
[See also https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/why-hyperlinks-are-blue/ which links to the answer above but also contains a few other references.]
[+] [-] gabereiser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cma|4 years ago|reply
This is why Apple makes Android users have white on green text, the least readable choice.
[+] [-] JonathonW|4 years ago|reply
Green hyperlinks stuck around in the Windows 95 help system, and were eventually replaced when Windows 98 switched to Microsoft's new HTML Help system which defaulted to blue hyperlinks (inherited from Internet Explorer).
[+] [-] sgarrity|4 years ago|reply
The timeline might undermine my assumption.
[+] [-] slingnow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|4 years ago|reply
Something the article doesn't touch on is the fact that there wasn't really such a thing as hex colors like "#0000ff" back then. You could use them, but no one did because they weren't guaranteed to work properly. There was a list of 256 "web safe colors" that you could use that were the 8 bit palette that most computers supported in VGA graphics (at 640x480 resolution), and then a further list of HTML colors that could be used if the user had a graphics card that could use 16 bit SVGA graphics. Using 24 bit hex code colors didn't come along until a little later, when computers were likely to display them properly.
In other words, links weren't #0000ff. They were "blue".
[+] [-] itomato|4 years ago|reply
"anchorColor: color Color to shade anchors whose corresponding documents haven't been previously visited. Default is blue3.
visitedAnchorColor: color Color to shade anchors whose corresponding documents have been previously visited. Default is violetred4."
https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/support/html/Docs/resources...
[+] [-] jandrese|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] recursive|4 years ago|reply
You could use names, or you could use colors whose RGB components were each multiples of 0x33. (00, 33, 66, 99, cc, ff)
[+] [-] bitwize|4 years ago|reply
I think some browsers understood X11 color names like "blue" or "DarkSlateGray", but there are more than 216 of those, so same caveat applies.
[+] [-] reaperducer|4 years ago|reply
There were plenty of us who surfed the web in less than VGA. I was on monochrome.
OS/2 Warp had a web browser and supported CGA: https://www.mit.edu/activities/os2/faq/os2faq0201.html
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masswerk|4 years ago|reply
In reverse order:
* Not all colors lent themselves equally well to a CRT, especially to the more cost effective ones. Green, esp. when in multiple shades, didn't render well (or, the other way round, issues with green are more easily detected by the human eye), so you won't see much green in early color UIs (or rather bright single-color expressions in elements like bars).
* Also, CRT specific, you want to stick with primary colors (RGB), since even a small misalignment of the cathodes will result in blurry text in more evenly distributed hues. (Same is true for the outer regions of larger color CRTs with shadow masks.)
* Monitor calibration wasn't always the best, shades of grey often exhibited a red hue, esp. on systems with a gamma of 2.0.
* Considering what we have established, we are searching for a color which consists mostly of R, G, or B and renders well on an average color CRT on top of a grey background of #C0C0C0. (Also, mind that in 1993/4, we're probably not speaking of millions of colors to choose from, but rather more of a 4-bit color palette, if we're looking for robustness.)
- Green, as already established, is somewhat complicated. Also, a mostly green color of comparable intensity is perceived somewhat brighter than, say a blue one. It will stand out against black text, probably more than you want, and it's contrast ratio to a light grey suffering from a red tint isn't great.
- Red may not be the best choice either, as its contrast to grey isn't the best (ask your printer) – and its use may be best reserved for representing an active state. (There's also the cultural issue with red usually signifying limits or even off-limit areas, which isn't especially inviting.)
- Which leaves blue for a passive state, which is actually a good choice. It's perceived slightly darker than the other primary colors, which is favorable for rendering text, it has a good contrast against light grey, and isn't affected by any missalignments or color calibration issues (as it doesn't share with red), and, while visible, isn't too distracting in what is mostly black text (you still want to provide for fluent reading of a given text, even, if it embeds a link). Moreover, it is more friendly to impaired vision than green or red (which are actually used in diagnosing defective vision). Properties, for which it had been used as a favorite color in UIs already. Moreover, on the cultural side of things, where red indicates restriction, blue indicates recommendation and instruction (compare traffic signs).
So, I think, blue was quite a natural choice.
[+] [-] EGreg|4 years ago|reply
A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn't used much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went color - I don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of course with CSS style sheets. There are many examples of style sheets which use different colors.
My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green.
One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena" browser which had a textured parchment background and embossed out the words of the link with a square apparently raised area.
https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html
[+] [-] onychomys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SavantIdiot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blibble|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billyhoffman|4 years ago|reply
- WorldWideWeb was not created in 1987. Tim Berners-Lee released it in December 1990, based on a proposal he developed in 1989 [1].
- Windows 1.0 in 1985 did not have hyperlinks. It also did not have overlapping windows. [2] That second screenshot is of Windows 2, (from December 1987) showing the "Help" system, which did use underlined hyperlinks, from 1989.
It makes me question the thoroughness of their research at all.
> What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one knows, but I have some theories. ... 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.
What? No! These are grad students working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the 1990s on big powerful Unix workstations [3]. I highly doubt the UI choices of Window 3 were relevant or closely watched by that team.
1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#Career_and_res...
2- https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-3-a-pair-o...
3- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)#History
[+] [-] setpatchaddress|4 years ago|reply
Yeah. All you need to know about this article.
[+] [-] duskwuff|4 years ago|reply
> Apple brought color to its HyperCards, but notably, the text links were still black and not blue.
HyperCard never natively supported any form of "text links". You could make a button with a text label, or a transparent button hovering over text, but there was no way to attach a behavior to a span of styled text without a lot of custom scripting.
(And, for what it's worth, the color XCMD for HyperCard never really caught on. It was a late addition, and never felt entirely like a native part of the application. Even when it was available, most users kept on authoring stacks in black and white.)
> However, some UI elements did have blue accents when interacted upon
I have no idea what the author is referring to here. Possibly the blue tint in the system UI (like window titlebars), which has nothing to do with HyperCard and didn't apply to its in-app UI?
[+] [-] arc-in-space|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdw|4 years ago|reply
This is what it looked like: http://toastytech.com/guis/win30help.png
[+] [-] dbt00|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Stratoscope|4 years ago|reply
Actually Windows 1.0 did have overlapping windows.
They just weren't the default style for application windows.
But there were popup windows that overlapped other windows on the screen. These were typically used for dialog and message boxes, for example the End Session message box midway through that filfre.net article.
There was nothing stopping anyone from using a popup-style window for their application, and adding a titlebar so you could move it around on the screen. It just wasn't the custom, and people would think your app was weird if it did that. And on a typical system of the day (no GPU!), dragging your window around on the screen would perform rather poorly.
[+] [-] purge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slightwinder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rufus_foreman|4 years ago|reply
WorldWideWeb was created by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
[+] [-] deathanatos|4 years ago|reply
> Here Microsoft uses the “hyperlink blue” for active states when a user clicks on different drives, folders and icons.
Hyperlink blue was a much brighter blue (pure blue, on the interfaces I used, but I was a litter later in the timeline) than Window's blue, which was a (noticeably) darker blue.
[+] [-] dystroy|4 years ago|reply
This looks simpler than listing a bunch of other UI, many non influential and none of them giving the answer.
[+] [-] joking|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordgrenville|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bityard|4 years ago|reply
It's basically a tour of old hyperlink and windowing systems... with lots of guessing and maybes. I'm not sure why it's relevant that Win 3.1 had blue titlebars, for instance. The author never actually answers her question but I imagine the obvious guess is the correct one:
Black text on a white background was the predominant GUI style at the time (probably due to Mac OS and Windows) and the software designers needed a visual cue that the hyperlink was clickable. Just underlined wouldn't have worked because underline was already a popular style in text processing. So they decided to give it a different color too. Blue is the most logical choice as it has good contrast against a white background, and has a neutral meaning (compared to say, red). There weren't really a lot of color choices back then, the largest palette you could count on at the time was 16 colors.
This was what Mosaic did and most browsers that came after it (including the most influential: Netscape) did what Mosaic did.
And there certainly were browsers of the era that didn't use blue underline for links, the next most common paradigm was some kind of bordered box around the text (usually the same color as the text).
[+] [-] gumby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|4 years ago|reply
Having lived through the 80s with computers and owning a Commodore 1084 I'd say most had color much earlier.
I remember using the ViolaWww browser on a color XTerminal in 1992.
[+] [-] sleavey|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55696808/why-do-h5-and-h...
[+] [-] Terretta|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thibran|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ducttapecrown|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotancohen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 101008|4 years ago|reply
I remember also, in the 90s, was quite popular yellow text against a black/dark blue background. The old days!
[+] [-] timw4mail|4 years ago|reply
It used to be any visited link would look visited, regardless of the website. This made it possible to see where a user had visited across the web, and so visited links only apply to the current origin now.
At some point it also became hip to remove the underline from links, and links rarely have underlines anymore.