You have undoubtedly noticed by now that although some links are golden and/or bold, most links are blue, especially on past web pages. but why? TL;DR’s answer is that the Mosaic browser released in early 1993 uses blue links, and because of the widespread distribution of browsers, blue has become the norm. OK.but why them Choose blue? With the simultaneous development of the Web and personal computing, this issue requires in-depth study of the technology of each era.
It is important to remember that the idea of hyperlinks predates the invention of color displays, and it thickens the plot slightly. But the key point seems to be Windows 3.1, released on April 6, 1992, when the hyperlink blue became the navigation and interaction color. A year later, the Mosaic release notes on April 12, 1993 included a bullet that became the starting point of the blue hyperlink:
Changed the default anchor point representation: unvisited blue and single solid underline, visited dark purple and single dashed underline.Mosaic release notes
Around the same time, Cornell University developed the Cello browser, which also used blue hyperlinks. Therefore, even before the advent of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, the concept of blue hyperlinks can be said to have nothing to do with the browser.
The author speculates that once the color monitor took over, blue was chosen to stand out among black and white, which seemed legal to us. However, can you imagine the blue hyperlinks on Hackaday? Ouch.
Speaking of an important question in the history of computing-who invented the mouse?