Why Hyperlinks Are Blue (and Other Quirky Web Origin Stories)
More than any single person, Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for inventing the internet. (sic web) And blue hyperlinks? He doesn’t even remember who chose the color.
‘There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default,’ Berners-Lee told a Q&A at the World Wide Web Consortium. ‘I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent a link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn’t used much in real documents.’
.. That jibes with what Ted Nelson, also a net pioneer, remembers. In 1965, he told Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff: ‘Links were visible straps between pages,’ nothing more, and there was no question of what color to make them since ‘color screens were not on the horizon.’
In fact, recalls Berners-Lee, ‘blue came in as browsers went color — I don’t remember which was the first to use blue… My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least.’