Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Consider removing link ink skipping #313

Closed
edwardhorsford opened this issue Jun 8, 2017 · 14 comments
Closed

Consider removing link ink skipping #313

edwardhorsford opened this issue Jun 8, 2017 · 14 comments

Comments

@edwardhorsford
Copy link
Contributor

In #281 we added text-decoration-skip: ink; to skip underlines near descenders - in theory because it looks better.

I wonder if we should reconsider this decision.

There are many examples where it makes single links look like multiple links. Are we happy with this?

NB - it generally looks better in Safari which doesn't skip as much.

Discuss.

Chrome

screen shot 2017-05-05 at 11 37 38
screen shot 2017-05-05 at 11 37 32
screen shot 2017-05-05 at 11 40 08

Safari

screen shot 2017-05-05 at 11 38 15
screen shot 2017-05-05 at 11 38 11

@selfthinker
Copy link
Contributor

I would be in favour of reverting it again. Evidence from a single user: It actually has happened to me that I opened the same page twice because I didn't realise that it was the same link.

@soniaturcotte
Copy link

soniaturcotte commented Jun 8, 2017

Agree.

Additionally, there are also instances within single words where the letter combinations just look strange. Example from elements:

screen shot 2017-06-08 at 16 19 09

@alextea
Copy link
Contributor

alextea commented Jun 8, 2017

To the contrary in 4 rounds of research on GOV.UK since this was deployed we haven't seen any issues with people getting confused.

@edwardhorsford
Copy link
Contributor Author

I wonder if we might be able to test anything in analytics related to this - any ideas?

Perhaps: number of people opening the same link twice from one source page - ie clicking both parts because they thought they were two links.

@alextea
Copy link
Contributor

alextea commented Jun 8, 2017

Will discuss with Vin when he is back from leave as we are already measuring this stuff for navigation. Not sure if we will have any significant findings however.

@selfthinker
Copy link
Contributor

selfthinker commented Jun 8, 2017

On the other hand, have there ever been users in user research who said anything ever about underlining or had issues with a link because it wasn't beautifully enough underlined? ;-)

@NickColley
Copy link
Contributor

NickColley commented Jun 9, 2017

Just to clarify the original change was to make links (in lists) more legible - not just a cosmetic change.

I'd be 👍 to revert since Chrome doesnt seem to render these as well as Safari 😢

@fofr
Copy link
Contributor

fofr commented Jun 9, 2017

@alextea I think it's less about getting confused and more about cognitive load and readability.
I'm in favour of reverting until Chrome has better typography.

As discussed with @NickColley, words containing g and p appear easier to read, while other characters like y, commas , and brackets ) leave strange artefacts that look like punctuation or a break in the text. I think the latter is more damaging than the former is beneficial – but that's opinion and reckons.

@alextea
Copy link
Contributor

alextea commented Jun 12, 2017

@selfthinker it's not about what they say, but we have observed that in some circumstances users don't recognise text as links when it is not underlined.

@alextea
Copy link
Contributor

alextea commented Jun 12, 2017

I'm also in favour of reverting btw.

@36degrees
Copy link
Contributor

To be clear, are we considering actively disabling it in Safari (where it's on by default) or are we just talking about removing the 'opt in' for Chrome?

@edwardhorsford
Copy link
Contributor Author

edwardhorsford commented Jun 13, 2017

I think Safari is marginally better - it's tighter around punctuation. Don't know if it's good enough to keep though.

Chrome:
screen shot 2017-06-13 at 10 21 53

Safari:
screen shot 2017-06-13 at 10 23 50

NickColley added a commit that referenced this issue Jun 14, 2017
We added underline skipping to hopefully make some content easier to read but looking
at some examples as seen at #313 Chrome
does a poor job of rendering underlines resulting in potentially confusing underlines that look like punctuation

This revert puts our links back to the 'boring' state of doing nothing special.
@gemmaleigh
Copy link
Contributor

Fixed by #316.

@robinwhittleton
Copy link
Contributor

Did anyone file a bug with Chrome about this issue? Would be good to reinstate in future if they fix their rendering.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

9 participants