[adamschwartz]

I appreciate your feedback. No doubt on some level this comes down to aesthetic preference. I’m curious though, on the before-and-after examples on the homepage [1] do you feel that all of the afters are worse?

You and devindotcom did indeed bring up some good points, particularly about descender-heavy links, something I plan to take a crack at [2]. But I’m curious if you feel the entire strategy is flawed or if there’s just more work to be done. On a related note: if you’ve used/seen it, how do you feel about links in iOS 8 Safari? How do you feel about this before-and-after [3] (screenshot of the first paragraph of the blog post)?

[1]: https://eager.io/showcase/SmartUnderline/

[2]: https://github.com/EagerIO/SmartUnderline/issues/1

[3]: http://postimg.org/image/rgfx5icq9/

[lstamour]

Well, I realised what was bugging me and why I prefer the iOS implementation for now -- the tighter underline, both a pixel closer to the baseline and a hair closer to each descender, helps ensure the underline feels continuous even when it's broken this way. I do prefer this approach for headlines or animated effects, but perhaps (as was suggested elsewhere) changing the underline colour and/or tightening the spacing would help. A neat implementation though. Seeing links here, it's true, the "g"s just seem to get demolished by the underline. I wonder, if I linked to qithub.com, would you see the difference? ;-)

Oh and if there's a way to apply this without requiring a background color, I suspect this might be a popular add-on or browser setting for some folks.

[adamschwartz]

See my comment above [1]. I think you’ll find that the iOS 8 and SmartUnderline implementations are closer than you think.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588492