[whatwg] borders on images inside links

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Steve Dennis <admin at subcide.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Apr 2010, L. Ian Hickson wrote:
>>
>> Personally, my opinion is that images in links should have borders because
>
>> otherwise how do you know it's a link?
>>
>> This seems to be a minority view, though. People have been explicitly
>> turning off this cue for literally over a decade.
>
> I think that browser defaults should make sense when the page is rendered
> Without author styles.  While authors often override this particular feature
> , there they have the option to represent linked images in other ways such
> as hover states, or more attractive borders etc.
>
> Authors also often overwrite many other browser defaults such as font,
> styles for horizontal rules, often margins on paragraphs/headings/lists etc.
> But it's probably not a good idea to set these things to zero.
>
> At the end of the day, I've never found turning off borders much of a hassle
> as an author.

As Ian said, though, borders are turned off *so often* that I don't
think it's an actual cue to users.  The actual cue I, and many normal
people I know of, use to see if an image is a link is to put the mouse
cursor over it and see if it turns into a pointer.  That's still
present, so we should be good.  It's not ideal for mobile browsers
without an explicit pointer, but I get along fine on my phone.

~TJ