Super consistency in you link-treatments is a difficult thing to scale. If you look at the Bookmarks that are featured on this site’s homepage in the sidebar, you’ll notice that the links are neither blue nor underlined. Another example would be the navigation through the NYTimes.com property. Maintaining an effective content-hierarchy drives decisions like this and the context that the positioning affords, makes them viable.

Most of the time, the positioning of the ads already communicates that the links and text are ad units. If anything would make users stay away from those links, it would be just that. The fact that there are certain inalienable properties that appear accross billions of google ads contributes to this effect as well.

I think you’re right that a lot of designers would love the added control that you desire. Unfortunately, when working with something so unmaleable it’s an issue of compromise. But encapsulating decions like this, with the help of context, can make them more manageable.

Paul Boag also notes that IE5 struggles with the border-bottom property. It’s true, but trivial. For one, the extent of the problem rests in the underline simply not showing up – the links still work and the main color remains. I have also made a conscious decision to not fully support an equivalent experience outside of the Grade-A browsers, making it all the less relevant for me. But I can comfortably say: ditching IE5 support is a safe bet for just about every new website project.

Btw, nice work on the Te Tuhi site. Love the grid-based design, semantic HTML and strong colors.

if it looks strange and unfamiliar, the reader won’t go near it.

Good design demands that users are not confused or tricked into clicking ads that look too much like main content, but text ads that appear “strange and unfamiliar” will probably receive fewer clicks.

Assuming that some similarity between text ads and non-ad links is a good idea, constraints arise as long as advertisers demand control over the presentation of their ads (admittedly, a reasonable demand). For example, Google currently allows website designers to customize the colors of AdSense for Content text ads, but does not allow customization of other CSS properties, including font-family, font-weight, text-decoration, or border-bottom. This limits the website designer who wants to apply some of these properties to both text ads and non-ad links.

You may be interested to know that my current approach to styling links is the same as the one you advocate. A few days back I launched a client site using border-bottom on links instead of the traditional underline. I agree that a subtle underline is less disruptive to a pages’ visual design.

In his Vitamin article on the topic Paul Boag argues against messing with the underline at all due to poor support for border-bottom on certain devices, but I think he’s in the minority on this one.