Safari Books Online is a digital library providing on-demand subscription access to thousands of learning resources.
- Create BookmarkCreate Bookmark
- Create Note or TagCreate Note or Tag
- PrintPrint
9. Sprucing Up Your Site's Navigation > Selecting Which Links to Style
Selecting Which Links to Style
As always in CSS, you have to select something before you can style it. For links, you need to tell CSS not only what you want to style, but also when you want that style to apply. Web browsers keep track of how a visitor interacts with links, and then displays that link differently depending on the link's status, or state. When you use a CSS link selector, you can target a specific link state as well.
Most browsers recognize four basic link states: an unvisited link, a link that's been visited already (meaning the URL is stored in the browser's history), a link that the visitor's mouse is poised over, and a link that's being clicked. As described in Chapter 3 (Pseudo-Classes and Pseudo-Elements), CSS gives you four pseudo-class selectors to accompany these states—:link, :visited, :hover, and :active. Using them, you can apply different formatting to each state, so there's no doubt in your visitor's mind whether he's been there or done that.
