A common question among children once they start to learn about the world around, “Why is the sky blue”. Strangely, few ask why links are normally blue on the web.

Why is the sky blue?

If you really care to know. The light from the sun is not necessarily yellow from it’s source. It’s all colors. As this light hits the atmosphere, light is scattered in all directions.  Blue light has the smallest and shortest waves, so the blue light waves get scattered around the most. Simple math, blue light has the shortest wave length, therefore is scattered the most.

Why are links blue?

If you look at most web sites, you will find that the links are blue a lot of the time. A link is the thing you click on to go from web page to page. Like this is a link to the main sephone site.

Not every web page is styled with blue links, there are all kinds of colors now. Around half of sites site still use the traditional blue link. The original color of the link was this shade of blue.

The answer to this question is equally easy to why the sky is blue. Because Sir Timothy Berners-Lee said so. Tim Berners-Lee is guy from England, he came up with the idea for http servers and clients, and the basics of html (and continues to oversee). These are the things underneath your browser that make the web work. He had 16 colors to pick from, and seemly at random picked blue. He wanted a dark color, but not black, so blue it was.