[HN Gopher] Why are hyperlinks blue? (2021)
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Why are hyperlinks blue? (2021)
Author : redbell
Score : 66 points
Date : 2025-10-02 20:13 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.mozilla.org)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| a weak clickbait-y post from 2021 that didn't even really answer
| its own question etc.
|
| Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934
| dazc wrote:
| Quite amusing once you know the real answer.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I (or a commenter who goes by the same name) contacted the
| author Elise Blanchard and introduced her to Ben Shneiderman,
| and gave her some links to our work on HyperTIES. She wrote a
| followup article with more detailed information.
|
| Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue:
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...
|
| It wasn't just a random or intuitive choice, but the results of
| studied empirical experiments and measurement (which is Ben's
| whole "thing"):
|
| >"We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many
| design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987
| conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as
| the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for
| links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK
| button, article length, and global string search were all
| studied empirically."
|
| Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988 - Ben demonstrating HyperTIES
| with blue hyperlinks, the system that influenced Tim:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg
|
| Here is my post to the hn discussion of her first article,
| included an email Ben wrote to me a year before the article,
| full of citations and links to papers and web pages about it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921532
|
| >Ben Shneiderman recalled that "Tim told me at the time that he
| was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on
| Hypertext project".
|
| >Ben Shneiderman wrote the following email to John Gilmore and
| I, in response to a question John asked me about the origin of
| the term "hyperlink" raised in a discussion on the Internet
| History mailing list. John then forwarded Ben's email to the
| Internet History mailing list.
|
| https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri...
|
| ----
|
| From: Ben Shneiderman <ben at cs.umd.edu> To: Don Hopkins <don
| at donhopkins.com> CC: John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com>, Ben
| Shneiderman <ben at cs.umd.edu> Subject: RE: [ih] origins of
| the term "hyperlink" X-ASG-Orig-Subj: RE: [ih] origins of the
| term "hyperlink" Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 15:15:52 +0000
|
| HI Don (and Jack Gilmore),
|
| Thanks for including me in this conversation.
|
| I do not have a claim for the term "hyperlinks" and don't know
| when it came into use. My claim is for the visual interface for
| showing highlighted selectable links embedded in paragraphs.
| This is what we called embedded menu items in that I think is
| an influential paper on the topic, which was peer-reviewed and
| published in the CACM in April 1986.
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/5684.5687
|
| http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Koved1986Embedded.pdf
|
| While Engelbart had shown a list that could be selected by
| pointing and clicking in 1968, I claim the idea of embedded
| highlighted selectable text in paragraphs. This was implemented
| by grad student Daniel Ostroff and described in:
|
| Ewing J, Mehrabanzad S, Sheck S, Ostroff D and Shneiderman B
| (1986), "An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump
| keys for an interactive encyclopedia", International Journal of
| Man-Machine Studies, Jan., 1986, Vol 24, pp. 29-45.
|
| [Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI]
|
| Ostroff D and Shneiderman B (1988), "Selection devices for
| users of an electronic encyclopedia: an empirical comparison of
| four possibilities", Information Processing and Management,
| Nov., 1988, Vol 24(6), pp. 665-680.
|
| [Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI]
|
| I think the 1988 paper was the earlier study, but the
| publication took a while.
|
| My students conducted more than a dozen experiments
| (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection
| using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold,
| underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a
| color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While
| red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and
| recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue,
| which Tim adopted.
|
| His systems with embedded menus (or hot spots), where a
| significant user interface improvement over early systems such
| as Gopher. But Tim told me at the time that he was influenced
| by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext
| project that we used Hyperties to build for the July 1988 CACM
| that held the articles from the July 1987 Hypertext conference
| at the University of North Carolina. The ACM sold 4000 copies
| of our Hypertext on Hypertext disks.
|
| Our history is here:
|
| https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/
|
| and the video is very helpful in showing the design we used,
| which is what I think Tim built on for his WWW prototypes.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg
|
| So in summary, I don't know who coined hypertext, but I do
| think our work visual and interaction design was influential.
|
| Our Hyperties system was picked up by Cognetics Corporation
| (around 1987) who made a modestly successful commercial run
| with it, doing dozens of corporate projects, most notably the
| Hewlett-Packard user manual for their Laserjet 4 was
| distributed as a Hyperties disk.
|
| Hyperties was the name we shifted to after we got a stop and
| desist order from a lawyer because our TIES (The Interactive
| Encyclopedia System) conflicted with an existing product. By
| then "hyper" was a growing term.
|
| Let me know if this helps, and what other questions you
| have.... Ben
|
| ----
|
| Here's more information about our work on HyperTIES and other
| stuff like pie menus and tabbed windows at the University of
| Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab:
|
| HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
|
| Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties
| Workstation Browser By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant,
| Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in
| Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101-117.
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...
| bertili wrote:
| Blue was by far the easiest on the eye compared to Red, Green,
| Yellow, Cyan, Purple, on a white background, on old CRT monitors.
|
| The more interesting question is why were backgrounds white
| rather than black?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| To match word processors in looking like paper maybe?
| ghaff wrote:
| More or less, from what I've read. Once there wasn't a
| technical issue, a white (or near white) background became
| seen as more user-friendly than a black background.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| [delayed]
| dboreham wrote:
| The industry has cycled back and forth between "dark mode" and
| "light mode" several times. Browsers first appeared in a "light
| mode" era, which I suppose probably began with the Lisa then
| the Mac, then Sun workstations. Black-on-white needed a more
| expensive high performance CRT and graphics output circuitry so
| possibly there was an element of chic associated with it vs
| lowly green/white text terminals that came before.
| drob518 wrote:
| Yep. I think by the time the web arrived, it was pretty
| common for the windowing systems (e.g., Windows, Mac System
| whatever, OpenVue, Next, etc.) to have black text on white
| backgrounds to mimic paper output.
| suhail wrote:
| I actually asked Marc Andreessen this question a few years ago
| while making a browser.
|
| Me: "why did you decide to make links blue?"
|
| Marc: "I sure as hell wasn't going to make them pink."
|
| Me: "what about green?"
|
| Marc: "ew"
| drob518 wrote:
| Can't fault his logic.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| What I am fairly sure at the moment, is that they no longer are.
| People are doing everything possible to NOT make them blue, which
| something makes them very hard to find
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Even more important would be the _purple_ hyperlinks (or any
| other distinct style) for those links that you 've already
| visited.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I've never liked that feature. You save a page to a PDF and
| it gets stuck in this permanent mix of blue and purple links.
|
| I've never needed my browser to tell me what I have and
| haven't visited. Especially since I use different browsers on
| different devices, so it's never even accurate anyways.
| mikeryan wrote:
| They're blue because Marc Andreesen liked blue.
|
| https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPO0A7dDvFm/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ...
| mmoustafa wrote:
| ... according to Marc Andreesen
| zkmon wrote:
| That's like reading about evolution of internet browsers. I
| witnessed the stuff since around 1991. I suspect the W3C and
| other standards bodies such as IETF might also have had some role
| in the matters of rendering the HTML markup. Ofcourse Mozilla was
| also a dominant player in shaping things up in this space.
| patel011393 wrote:
| They're blue because computer scientist Ben Schneiderman made
| them blue using research from 1985:
|
| " In 1985, a group of students at the University of Maryland,
| mentored by computer science professor Ben Shneiderman ,
| conducted a series of experiments to study the impact of
| different hyperlink colors on user experience. They were eager to
| determine which color would be the most effective in terms of
| visibility and readability.
|
| The experiments revealed interesting findings. While red
| highlighting made the links more noticeable, it negatively
| affected users' ability to read and comprehend the surrounding
| text. On the other hand, blue emerged as the clear winner. It was
| dark enough to be visible against a white background and light
| enough to stand out on a black background. Most importantly, it
| did not interfere with users' retention of the text's context."
|
| Mozille should really do better research before posting histories
| like this. It's easy to overlook the impact of academic research
| in tech.
|
| Source:
|
| Barooah, S. (2023, June 09). Why Were Hyperlinks Chosen To Be
| Blue? Retrieved from
| https://www.newspointapp.com/english/tech/why-were-hyperlink...
| valiant55 wrote:
| What did the internet look like in 1985? I was under the
| impression that it'd all be terminal based since the world wide
| web didn't exist. I'm not sure how a hyperlink would function
| in such an interface.
| wmf wrote:
| Check out HyperCard; it had hyperlinks before the Web.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Related - The Computer Chronicles - Hypercard (1987)
| https://youtu.be/FquNpWdf9vg
|
| Note that hyperlinks in hypercard weren't blue necessarily,
| but the mouse cursor did change to indicate it was
| clickable.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It definitely did -- they weren't in color though.
|
| I'm not sure if HyperCard ever had full color support?
| There was some support for color images in a later version
| of HyperCard, but did color text ever make it before it was
| shut down completely?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It definitely did -- they weren't in color though.
|
| They were invisible. In HyperCard you could make any
| region of the screen clickable, and run a script when it
| was clicked. Not unlike the image maps that websites used
| to use. You would normally include something visual in
| the clickable region, but you didn't have to.
|
| I believe the mouse cursor would change if you put it
| inside a clickable region.
| msla wrote:
| Was HyperCard ever used over the Internet? I thought it was
| just local decks of cards.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _They 're blue because..._
|
| There's no causal evidence in what you posted.
|
| Sure, the experiments determined blue would be a good color.
|
| But I don't see any evidence that the developers of Mosaic were
| aware of the research or used that to inform their choice.
| hinkley wrote:
| They were blue when I got there and while we discussed how
| blue was chosen that is the extent of my recollections of the
| time - that it was discussed but not the rarionale. They were
| inspired/informed by the range of colors available in CGA,
| ANSI and early VGA color palettes. You can't use a color that
| doesn't exist on low end hardware.
|
| It would have made sense for Lynx to settle on blue for
| ergonomic reasons. ANSI blue is a particular shade thats
| approximated in hyperlink colors.
| morkalork wrote:
| There's a rant that can follow this about usability peaking in
| the late 90s/early 2000s. Back when companies care about
| usability research over aesthetics. Buttons looked like buttons
| yadda yadda.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| The Mozilla article does reference the Hyperties system Ben
| Schneiderman worked on, linking to
| https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/ with the following
| comment:
|
| " This may be an ancestor of our blue hyperlink we know and
| love today, but I do not believe that this is the first
| instance of the blue hyperlink since this color is cyan, and
| not dark blue."
| amelius wrote:
| Simple.
|
| Red is a warning color, also has bad contrast on white
| background.
|
| Green on white has bad contrast.
|
| Blue has best contrast on both white and black backgrounds, and
| stands out from black.
|
| Clear winner.
|
| (Virtually everybody who ever made a PowerPoint presentation
| figured this out)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Blue has best contrast on both white and black backgrounds,
| and stands out from black.
|
| Why would it matter if it has good contrast on two different
| backgrounds? If you're changing the color of the background,
| you can also change the color of the link.
| al_borland wrote:
| It's nice to be able to change between the two most common
| background colors without needing to develop a whole theme.
|
| In the days before CSS was commonplace, it would also be
| very annoying to manage.
| hamonrye wrote:
| This is oddly remeniscent of the Rhine Experiments conducted in
| 1937, where decks of cards with symbols inscribed were
| presented to a series of subjects to test extra-sensory
| perception. What Joseph Banks Rhine found as an abstract was
| that a statistical deviancy exists for programmatic ideation.
| nftu wrote:
| As a red-green colorblind person, curse the person who decided
| visited links should be purple.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You can override this in most browsers. (And for those where
| you can't, there's always userstyles.)
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Starting from a white background, what other color can it be?
|
| It has to be a dark color, and blue is the darkest of the primary
| and secondary colors.
|
| With 16 color displays typical at the time, you can use one of
| the 8 remaining "half brightness" colors. Dark red is still red,
| and red tends to mean that something is wrong, which is not the
| message here. Dark blue and grey do not provide enough of a
| contrast. Dark yellow and dark green look ugly, they use it in
| generic cigarette packaging for that reason. Dark cyan could have
| worked I guess, but that's still a shade of blue, so you might as
| well just use blue.
|
| Go beyond the VGA standard 16 colors and many computers of the
| time may not render it correctly.
| geoffpado wrote:
| > Starting from a white background
|
| Possibly an incorrect assumption. As several of the screenshots
| in the article show, the default background color of the web
| back then was gray, not white.
| crazygringo wrote:
| So Mosaic did it in 1993.
|
| I could have sworn WinHelp [1] (the help viewer built into
| Windows 3.0) did it in 1990, but looking it up it turns out their
| hyperlinks were _dark green_. My memory had changed them to blue
| retroactively...
|
| A couple of images:
|
| https://virtuallyfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/WinHelp-...
|
| https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~mgoetsch/cali/Windows%20Config...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinHelp
| dboreham wrote:
| Thanks for posting because I had the same false memory that
| WinHelp used blue links.
|
| I certainly don't remember feeling that anything about the
| first browsers or html was new and surprising. It was more like
| "oh good someone made a free implementation of that obvious
| idea". There were plenty of documentation systems used
| industrially that also had links. Gopher existed.
| dang wrote:
| Related (including alternative answers):
|
| _Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811 - Jan 2022 (60
| comments)
|
| _Why are hyperlinks blue?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934 - Aug 2021 (255
| comments)
| mrandish wrote:
| One thing worth mentioning as a possibly-contributing factor was
| that in the very early 90s a lot of the installed base of high-
| res (eg non-interlaced) color monitors where still digital RGB
| (RGBI) which were limited to 16 colors (and often just 8 colors
| in two intensities each). In many palettes the 8 base colors were
| black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow. So,
| there weren't a lot of colors to choose from. CRTs had RGB
| primaries so cyan, magenta and yellow weren't generally as
| legible for single pixel width lines (ie text).
|
| I also always assumed part of the choice of blue was that in many
| locales red, yellow and green have connotations of stop/alert,
| warning and go/okay (respectively) - whereas blue was relatively
| more agnostic. So... if you're targeting the widest installed
| base of displays, out of the lowest common denominator choices
| available blue was pretty much the obvious remaining choice.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| There is a video of marc andreesen going around where that
| question given to him:
| https://x.com/mrexits/status/1956237638878552418
| aatd86 wrote:
| So did Marc Andreessen take undeserved credit or not? That's what
| I want to know...
| rappatic wrote:
| Intuitively it makes a lot of sense. Red is obviously associated
| with "bad/stop/destructive" and green with "positive/go" while
| blue is neutral in this respect. The other colors aren't primary
| and they have their own problems: orange is too similar to red
| and yellow is too hard to make out against a white background.
| Purple is okay which is why it's used for "visited" links but
| it's much less ubiquitous than blue in everyday life which makes
| it gaudy/distinctive.
| drob518 wrote:
| I suspect it's for the same reason that the two most popular pen
| colors are black and blue. On light backgrounds, blue shows up
| well and doesn't impede readability. So, if all your text is
| black by default and you want another default color that is also
| readable, blue's an obvious choice. Add underlines for users
| working in grayscale environments.
| ghssds wrote:
| Microsoft's EDIT, QBASIC, QuickBASIC and MSDOS 6.x had on-screen
| help in the form of hypertext documents with white links inside
| green brackets on a black background. It looked good. Windows
| 3.1x also had on-screen help in the form of hypertext documents
| with underlined green links on a white background. It also looked
| good. They cherry-picked their examples by talking about Windows
| 3.1 without mentioning that. First time I experienced the world
| wide web, it was using NCSA Mosaic and it featured blue
| hyperlinks instead of green, which was a surprise.
| ivankelly wrote:
| They're blue because pmarca was a democrat back then
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