HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS

9.5. Text Decorations

The text-decoration property allows you to add any of four specific effects to text:

• underline

• overline

• blink

• line-through

In addition, the text-decoration property can take a value of none, which has utility in one specific situation I'll discuss in a moment.

I'm going to ignore blinking as a text decoration. Many mainstream browsers ignore it, because it fell into almost immediate disrepute when Netscape first introduced it as a nonstandard HTML tag. Blinking text is widely considered amateurish and bad design.

I also believe that using underlining is a bad idea, but I have less company in that position than with the blinking text issue. Users are accustomed to seeing hyperlinks underlined. My view is that deliberately underlining ...