a:hover background-color

[David]

Is it just my imagination or is there a growing tendancy among the CSS geek fraternity to use a text background colour change on a:hover rather than an underline. A number of recently redesigned sites I've visited in the last few days, such as mezzoblue (http://www.mezzoblue.com/), are using this technique.

Is there an article in this month's CSS Geek magazine saying that this is the fasionable way to be dealing with link styles at the moment or is there a serious usability/accessibility issue at work?

Personally, I prefer the A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/) method of underline on hover with a colour change.

What's your favourite?

[francis]

Never been a fan of changing the entire background colour of text on a link - I think it looks too blocky. Adding/removing an underline/border and a colour change is more than enough of a visual clue. Oh, and would that be the normal ALA, this version (http://www.acvo-services.co.uk/) (via Andy Budd's site (http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2004/09/bafta_award_winning_design_thieves/)) or maybe this one (http://www.missionarlington.org/)?!

The current trend of changing the colour of entire paragraghs (http://www.mezzoblue.com/tests/paragraph-hover/) (view in not-IE) when they are hovered over is driving me nuts, though. I wish people would stop doing it as there really is no need. If you're going to feed standards compliant browsers new tricks, at least make them good ones.

[David]

Hah, the SCVO Services (http://www.acvo-services.co.uk/) site is interesting in that it looks fine in Moz but in IE, the right-hand float is pushed below the content. Is this a case of development in Moz only and not checking in IE (bonkers?).

I agree about the paragraph highlight. I can see that it may have some specific uses but generally it's quite distracting.

I must admit I'm rather taken with the border-bottom a:hover. For me it has two advantages. First it is clearer - I feel that the normal underline is too tight to the text and makes it difficult to read - the border is clear of the text. Secondly, it allows for the "underline" to be a different colour from the text and this can be quite effective.

You just need to be sure of the context. Sometimes, adding a border can cause "jiggling" (rather like using font-weight:bold with a:hover) and I really hate that more than anything.

[francis]

Argh - one of my absolute pet hates is people changing text on hover to bold/a different size. The text jiggles about all over the place and can move everything around it.

The only thing to be aware of with border support for links is that it isn't supported by IE5.0 which doesn't do inline styling at all. But that depends on whether you want to support it or not. I use a dashed bottom border on acronyms to give a visual clue that moving the mouse over the word may do something. People are natually inclined to move their mouse over something underlined.

The ACVO site was just ripped from ALA, I doubt if they did much, if any checking. Scumbags of the web, but there you go...

[Ronald Ng]

I think it works quite well when u use it for tables, and the whole row changes colour.