Links: underline, dotted, color, bold?

I usually use underlines. It's the standard way for showing links.

If not for links, what else can underlnes be used for? I don't like highlighting or emphasising text with underlines as it can easily be confused for a link.

The only times when I don't use underlines is when the link is in, say, a button, or obvious navbar. But for links within body text, it's always underline.

If possible, I also try to use a different colour, but only if it's in keeping with the overall colour scheme.

Having links the same color as text is very confusing and hard to find.
I prefer to make them different colours and/or underline on/off hover.
It annoys me when people abuse the hover attribute, like making it bold or italic on mouseover which throws the pages layout all out of wack.

nav:
bold,
nav-hover:
bold,
underline

body:
bold,
underline,
body-hover:
bold,

... hope that made some sence,

I definitely agree with Busy, mostly underlined or occasionally a different colour for body links. It really does annoy me when on hover it goes bold or bigger as the page jumps all over the place!!

I usually do colour + underline for body links. It really is the standard way of doing things and least likely to confuse the viewer.

How odd.....I wonder how they expect people to find the links on the page that way.....LOL. For clients I typically use the standard underlined links however some have requested bold text links with no underline and in those cases I use the underline on hover. I figure as long as the links are noticably a different color than the plain text it's OK.

Seems that removing the underline has become more and more common.

"Seems that removing the underline has become more and more common." Yes, and for the moment I've put underlines back on in my site to be different!!

Peter

Just because it's commonly done doesn't mean that it's the best way to do things. I still think that leaving the underlines on is the best way to make it clear to the user what is and is not a link.

Just the other week I was teaching my neighbour to to use the internet, it's real hard when you tell them links are clickable and are blue and underlined. Then you go to a site and has no underlined links even on hover. real confusing for a newcomer.

One of my sites I built way back in late 90's I used different color links but at the top of every page I had this color equal a link, this color equals a visited link, i think its still there today.

The visited aspect of the link has been forgotten lately, which does make looking over a big site hard as you don't know where you've been. I'm guilty of this one

i always put blue underlined links, they just make the site look better. no hover effects, just plain links.

I use a number of different things, depending on the location of the links. If the links are in a navigation list or bar, then I remove the underlining, for the most part, because it makes the link words much harder to read.

However, within text, I leave some version in there (using either text-decoration or border) because otherwise it disappears. I used to remove the underlines from visited links, but I don't do that anymore.

This is speaking on a personal site, however. For business sites the rules are slightly different, and default underlining is usually the best. Heck, I may even leave off styling the hyperlinks entirely depending on the audience!