Ben Shneiderman's the "hyperlinks should always be blue" guy. ;)

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811

Seriously, while he was the first to use blue for links in HyperTIES, there was a historical context (like the IBM PC's color palette), and he never meant it in a "640k ought to be enough for anybody" way. His reasons for recommending blue are based on empirical studies, measuring visibility, comprehension, retention, etc.

Blue is good not just because users recognize it (they didn't in 1983), but for how it stands out, because of how the human visual system works. He was originally a fan of cyan aka "light blue".

Ben Shneiderman wrote:

>"Red highlighting made the links more visible, but reduced the user’s capacity to read and retain the content of the text… blue was visible, on both white and black backgrounds and didn’t interfere with retention,"

>"We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.”

>"My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted."

HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...