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May 09, 2008
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Italics Instead of Underlines
Gwoman with italics exampleoing back to the days of typewriters, underlining was somewhat common. Aside from the occasional handwritten note and Web pages, this is probably the only place that you've ever seen underlining used. There's a reason for that. The reason is that it doesn't belong in professional publishing.

Underlining, on the typewriter, was done because there was no other way to emphasize words or indicate titles of publications. Today, because we use computers and have access to type styles, there's no need to underline text. We put words in italics. Underlining looks clunky and actually undermines the legibility of a document by obscuring the descenders of lower-case letters (like the letters g, j, p, q, and y).

The Web, which was obviously not set up by a typographer, uses underlining for a different purpose. Underlines on the Web should only be used to indicate a hyperlink. This is what visitors to a Web site have come to expect. It is my belief that all text links should be underlined for this reason.

I personally don't care for sites that don't use underlining. It's sometimes hard to figure out where the links are on a particular page. It seems that some designers actually try to hide the suckers in their desire for subtle design.slug


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