There has long been a broader debate about whether link underlining is a distraction. My personal opinion is that the gains in readability far outweigh the canonical view advanced by Jakob Nielsen, i.e., the perceived affordance that comes with visually displaying underlined links. I would contend that the familiarity and ease with varied visual displays of affordance of links are now so deep and wide among users, as not to be as compelling or as essential as Nielsen suggests.

This is why all LSNC sites by default have for the last 10 years or so not displayed underlined links. In that time, not a single person has complained they could not figure out where the links were. And it is why, as we continue our rebuild of all the LSNC sites, we are styling the Google custom search results so that titles are not underlined.

Other posts of possible interest...

• Readability: The Bookmarklet
• Google Docs file uploads: Major improvements but still lacks local synchronization
• The Manymoon experience
• Readability + The Printliminator!

The Readability extension does a simple thing I need literally every day, i.e., it makes single posts superbly more readable and printable. It is that simple. For any article on the Web I have a serious interest in reading, rather than just scanning, then I want what Readability does for me: With one click, I have the article stripped of all that is extraneous, set typographically for ease of reading with an optimal font family, font size, content width and comfortable leading, and I can also print it out should that suit me.

To see how well this works, take a raw gander at this article today by Gail Collins and David Brooks of the New York Times: Where Did All the Angry Voters Go? Sure, it’s readable enough. If you are OK with the altogether small font and old school newspaper-y column width, not to mention all the other clutter and advertisements on the page. Then install the Readability add-on and view the same page again. As my ophthalmologist always asks me, “Better one or better two?”

But wait, there are even more options! Try The Printliminator bookmarklet, available at the extraordinary CSS-Tricks. I don’t think you can beat the overall ease of use one gets from the Readability add-on, but The Printliminator gives you a further edge: You can first view the article via Readability, and then trigger The Printliminator to remove all the images or photos in the article, to strip everything down even further. Again, “Better one (using Readability) or better two (using Readability + The Printliminator)?”

You decide.

Other posts of possible interest...

• Underlined links: Does real-world usability trump the canonical view?
• Rebuild 08: Project content and CSS3 transition examples
• Readability: The Bookmarklet

What to do? Try this, on both counts:

Readability – An arc90 Lab Experiment, which creates a custom bookmarklet for you, based on your choice of font style, text size and content margins. (There is a helpful explanation of the thinking behind its purpose and function.) Make your selections and then drag the designated “Readability” link to your browser’s toolbar. Henceforth, when you’re at a web page with content you wish had better online readability, click on the bookmarklet, to great effect.

Here’s a concrete example to better make the point, with the Readability bookmarklet set to “Newspaper, Medium, Wide”…

True Irish, a memorable New York Times blog item by Timothy Egan about the Irish of Butte, Montana. (As a side note, the article cuts to my heart since my great grandfather and grandfather, among several other family ancestors, are from Butte. That’s my great grandfather, to the right, who is buried in the cemetery mentioned in the article.) In fairness, the blog item itself is well set typographically and displays nicely as a web page; the print version, not so much. But if you use the Readability bookmarklet, you get an entirely different experience: A 550px wide display of only the blog article, with all the other, extraneous page information removed. All you see is what you want to read. And you can print it out, also without all the extraneous stuff:

Needless to say, “Ní­l aon tintéan mar do thintéan féin.”

Other posts of possible interest...

• Underlined links: Does real-world usability trump the canonical view?
• Google Docs file uploads: Major improvements but still lacks local synchronization
• The Manymoon experience
• Rebuild 07: Headlines using Typekit fonts