Jon Wertheim's excellent coverage of the Australian Open men's tennis final last weekend featured a letter from John Webb, a reader from South Carolina who complained about the use of hyperlinks in cnnsi.com stories. Unlike sites like this one that use both font color and underlining to mark hyperlinks, cnnsi.com marks its links only in red. (I think they are red: I, too, am color blind.) The reader suggests choosing another color, but I have to wonder what is the problem with underlining? If that makes an ugly composition, how about adopting bold? The site currently abuses bold to mark proper names that have no links.
With the well-documented difficulties in the newspaper industry, it seems clear that even those of us who now get much of our daily information electronically will only continue to rely more and more on the internet. The ability to reference and cross-reference through hyperlinks is, along with the facility to update frequently, the demonstrable advantage of the form. But who wants to pore over lines and lines of online text in an attempt to discern subtle changes in color? If everyone, short of Kanye West, knows that you do not write in all caps, can we not agree similarly to refrain from relying solely on color to mark those places you would like your readers to click?
