On 11/06/05, sannse sannse@tiscali.co.uk wrote:
We had an email asking why we override browser defaults to underline links. I've asked about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Monobook.css , but am not sure how much that is watched. Any comments would be most helpful there.
As I understand it: * some people voted, a long time ago, to keep underlines (or, rather, "use browser default") - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Link_style_vote
* when 1.3 came out, with the spangly new MonoBook skin, it included non-underlined links, and people complained - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.3_comments_and_bug_reports/Archiv...
* the skin as distributed with the software still has them non-underlined by default (underline on hover), and indeed most Wikimedia projects leave them as such, but "by popular demand", the English Wikipedia overrides this in its global stylesheet
Whether that makes it the *right* thing to do, I've no idea.
[On a technical note, I can't quite work out how the user preference toggle for this works, but it might be cleaner to have this set as a default preference rather than explicit in the stylesheet]