“I became interested in trying to create the ideal text underline in CSS after reading an excellent post about it on (and about) Medium. In that post, Marcin Wichary offers a list of goals for his ideal link underline: So, the ideal technological solution would allow us to: change the width of the line (with additional half-pixel/retina support), change the distance from the text, change the color (even if just to simulate thinner width by using lighter grays instead of black), clear the descenders, (perhaps) have a separate style for visited links. Wichary goes on to detail Medium’s solution, which uses a CSS background-gradient to fulfill the first three goals in his list, but does not separate character descenders (e.g. the part of a letter that descends below the baseline) from the underline.” - urbansheep@gmail.com