Oct 19

Written by: Matthew Hile
10/19/2006 5:04 AM

In its default installation DNN (up to and including 3.2.2) breaks the expected user experience with regards to links. By default the style sheet sets links text-decoration: none;. What this means is that the user has only a slight shift in color to identify a link. Moreover, unlike the browser's typical default, visited links do not look any different than unvisited links. I for one rely on being easily able to identify a link because it is underlined and whether or not I have visited it based on its color. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox article entitled Guidelines for Visualizing Links provides great information on why this is important.

So how do you fix the problem? There are two options.

• For a single site go to the Style Sheet Editor which you will find on the Admin > Site Settings page and add "text-decoration: underline;" (without the quotes) to the a:link and a:visited styles.
• If you want to fix all of the sites change the a:link entries in the ..\Portals\_default\default.css file.
  

Making these changes helps your users better understand and use your site.

UPDATE: This code only works in Firefix and not IE (tested in version 7). After much searching, experimentation, and trial and error work I found that dropping the trailing semicolon allowed this approach to work in both browsers.

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