Sunday, October 1, 2006 - Sun, 1 Oct 2006

If you go to Behold’s Home Page or to Google, you will see the Internet standard for hyperlinks for many years: as underlined blue text. I had set up Behold to be this way as well, but once I put the hyperlinks on the names, there now became a lot text in blue and underlined. This is not only a little ugly, but can make it hard to determine which link you are hovering over and will get selected when you click.

So take a look at Yahoo. They still have the blue text, although it is a shade of blue that is hard to distinguish from black. But as you hover over the hypertext, it becomes underlined and it is immediately obvious what it is and what link will be activated when you click. If you look at Myspace, they take it a step further. When you hover over, the link not only gets underlined but also changes color.

I’d like to remove the underlines from the hyperlinks in Behold to now make it look better. And add the underline and change of color when hovering. I’ll make these all options in Version 1.1. But I ran into an unexpected snag in trying to change the look of the hyperlinks. In Richview, this just wasn’t easy to do.

The cursor changes nicely when hovering, and changes back to an arrow when leaving the hyperlink. The coloring and underlining should work the same way. But the cursor is an attribute of the screen, coloring is a property of the text style, and underlining is a style attribute of the text style. Each is handled slightly differently in Richview.

I spent about 20 hours working on this over the last few days. I’ve got it close to working but still with a couple of glitches. I’ve been checking Richview forums for possible ideas, pouring over the help files, debugging the code step by step and I sent a few forum questions myself when I got stuck. But I don’t expect to spend too much longer.

This one little feature will enhance the usability and feel of Behold a lot, so I’d like to get it right if I can.