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.
It wasn't just a random or intuitive choice, but the results of many empirical studies and experiments (which is Ben's whole "thing", and unfortunately extremely rare these days):
>“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:
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:
>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.
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.
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 f...
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
No mention of the Amiga?
Amiga Guide is a hypertext format, first released around 1992 with Workbench 2.1 I think, with Blue highlighting, again if memory serves, inherited from the OS theme.
23 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 61.2 ms ] threadDiscussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934
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 many empirical studies and experiments (which is Ben's whole "thing", and unfortunately extremely rare these days):
>“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 f...
The more interesting question is why were backgrounds white rather than black?
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”
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPO0A7dDvFm/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ...
" 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...
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.
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
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)
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.
If you had a white phosphor terminal, it would have been White on Black.