[alrlroipsp]

> they seem to highlight some text in a sentence by making it blue, but it's not a link. Quite annoying.

This is a blast from the past, indeed!

Blue links is the ancient default when you don't use css.

It was news for me that any websites still would not override the default css, though.

[notpushkin]

Blue text color and underline are two things that universally help people recognize links – so no matter how custom your CSS is, using any of these traits for other purposes is a bad idea.

Of course, nowadays links can be any color and without underline, and we're getting used to it too. This only means that using any color to emphasise words in a text is a bad idea, as more and more people would see that as a link and get confused.

Just stick to the good old italics.

[8organicbits]

I suspect this is why many modern websites use the blue links with underline. People instantly see them as links.

Examples:

Azure Blog: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-learn-blog/...

If you look at the CSS, they actually went out of their way to add that underline back in, it's intentional.

A more common pattern seems to be blue text that gets underlined on hover.

  * AWS Docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2/index.html
  * GCP Docs: https://cloud.google.com/docs/

Web applications likely prefer buttons as links, which probably makes sense. They aren't "web pages" they are "applications". Text web pages stick to traditional HTML metaphors.