Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Well, I have two comments.
- Setting text color to black guarantees returns from Amazon (assuming that the book sells and people read it); both from readers, and, eventually, a nastygram from Amazon saying that they've taken your book down, as it isn't readable in Night Mode, because you set the text color to black, not automatic, so when Night Mode is chosen, absolutely NONE of your links will be visible, at all, and,
- I, for one, don't understand how/why on earth anyone would de-underline links meant to go to a glossary, index, or footnotes. While I can understand why some people dislike the underlining on the TOC, removing them from all other links seems utterly counterintuitive. How will your readers know that the word in the body text has a link, to click? By Telepathy? And if you have users who are not expecting links, why would they look for them? Is the expectation that they'll somehow see the pointing hand on the word, through inadvertence? Or as if the cursor reads word-by-word, which it doesn't?
I don't mean to sound snarky, but I had this situation with a client recently, with some 700+ footnotes in his book. He loathed the dreaded "blue" links in his book, which had a color scheme. I said, sure, fine, we can change it to black, as long as you understand that in Night Mode, no one will be able to see them. That was the end of that discussion. We had another client who also wanted some several hundred glossary items linked, from the first occurrence of each word, to the glossary. He then had a cow over the underscores. I asked him: how will your readers know to click the word? What possible clue is provided that the word is a link? That discussion was also over with rather quickly.
FWIW, I have found, over the course of some 2K books, that readers do NOT know that the TOC items are linked when they are NOT underlined. I've seen complaints from readers in reviews about "not linked TOC's," when the old prc (mobipocket) tags were used, and the TOC entries WERE linked...but the readers couldn't tell that they were. People are accustomed to seeing underscores under links.
Lastly, if By 2, in your post, I understand that the idea is that each anchor link has to have inline CSS...thanks, but I think I'll stick with either underscores, or find a different way. That feels as though it's fallback coding for K7, not for K8, and the problem is, if you put it inline, then you're overriding the CSS for the K8 files. Not to mention, I'm a firm believer in not using inline CSS unless there's simply no other alternative. {shrug}
Hitch |
Very valid points.
However, I'm of the opinion that glossary-linked items should not be blue, underlined, and otherwise glaring and blatant. They should be differentiated from the rest of the text, but in a way that's easy to handle. If some readers don't get it, then at least we're not ruining the experience for the rest of them.
But still, valid points. Here are some thoughts:
- Why not try "color: inherit" (for the newer file types) and see if makes things jive in Night Mode, color swapping and all that?
- Instead of coloring the words black so they're indistinguishable from text (and invisible in Night Mode) maybe color them a shade of blue or gray that is visible in both modes, and can be differentiated from the rest of the text? (Obviously blue will only show up on color devices.)