I was also interested in the Twitter example. I'm always one for encouraging links to look like links, but there have to be exceptions β menu nav is the canonical example where you can usually get away with not blue-underlines because the menu nav is usually obviously links.
The typical defence against custom-styled links is that blue-underlines look 'ugly'. Whilst this sounds initially like a poor argument, if you reword 'ugly' as 'distracting', you start approaching a good UX argument.
Maybe the equivalent of such 'self links' is the convention around fragment identifiers and elements with IDs that sites 'expect' that you might want to link to β e.g. headers. Typically, when you hover over such a header, you'll see a ΒΆ, or similar symbol, which is linked to that ID.
On twitter.com listings, the entire tweet is now a link to the individual tweet page β was that always the case? It's not perfectly discoverable, of course, but it's pretty good. Hmm... I've just realised that's also not a proper link, of course...
The typical defence against custom-styled links is that blue-underlines look 'ugly'. Whilst this sounds initially like a poor argument, if you reword 'ugly' as 'distracting', you start approaching a good UX argument.
Maybe the equivalent of such 'self links' is the convention around fragment identifiers and elements with IDs that sites 'expect' that you might want to link to β e.g. headers. Typically, when you hover over such a header, you'll see a ΒΆ, or similar symbol, which is linked to that ID.
On twitter.com listings, the entire tweet is now a link to the individual tweet page β was that always the case? It's not perfectly discoverable, of course, but it's pretty good. Hmm... I've just realised that's also not a proper link, of course...