[jalfresi]

"Great, let's use the screen to do nothing but show that it is a bunch of pixels"

But it does that.

I'm not sure you follow my point - I would rather things on my screen did not waste those pixels pretending to be something they are not, in order to convince me that I can kind-of using it like that thing.

Here is an example:

Many web designers disguise hyperlinks on their page. They change the colour, remove the underline, add a 3d border to make it look like a button. Some go even further; some use a form button and add a click handler which fires of a page change when clicked.

My point is that a hyperlink is what it is. Why deliberately shatter the intrinsic understanding of how the web page works by purposefully destroying all that knowledge and then forcing the user to construct new understanding? Why can't a hyperlink be blue underlined text?

The answer to this question is usually "because it does not fit with the style or aesthetic of the page". And there-in lies the problem; the purpose of the page is not aesthetics.

[vanderZwan]

> But it does that.

No, it does not. It uses these pixels to (re)present something else. You don't put down a slab of marble and say "this is a sculpture about marble" either.

I understand and agree with your viewpoint on hyperlinks, but I'm talking about the other extreme end, which is what a lot of shitty flat design ends up as.