Very good - on underlining links

We shouldn’t rely on colour alone to indicate that something is interactive.

Take links, for example. Sure, you can give them a different colour to the surrounding text, but you shouldn’t stop there. Make sure there’s something else that distinguishes them. You could make them bold. Or you could stick with the well-understood convention of underlying links.

---- Also see https://adactio.com/journal/22085 follow up for underline and line-height with the unit lh.

A small web development thing I’d missed until yesterday:

When you want a link to open a page in a new tab, you’ve long been able to add the attribute target="_blank" to the tag. The problem was, that actually gave the opened pages rights to their referrer: it opened a security hole that could potentially have leaked user information or opened the door to phishing.

In response to that, the received wisdom was to also add rel="noopener" to the tag — or, more commonly, rel="noopener noreferrer", which strips referrer information from analytics. (Please don’t do this second part. For all kinds of reasons, it’s useful for a publisher to see who’s sending them traffic.) I’ve been adding noopener for years.

It turns out that browsers have been automatically setting this for links where target="_blank" since 2021: for three full years (and, actually, longer for Safari and Firefox). So there’s no need to add it anymore. There’s no harm in setting it, but there’s also no need.