what's the different between a and a:link?

a and a:link

Posted: Sun, 2008-05-18 13:54

Well the title of your question is what's the difference between a and a:link. a is all links. a:link is specifically untouched (uncached) links. :link, :hover and all other specific forms of a can override a's styles, in the order that they are listed in the css. a:link as far as I'm concerned is useless because, being a more specific form of a, it cannot pass down its styles to other a's (so if you wanted all links to be text-decoration: none, then don't set it on a:link or you'll just have to set it on every other sort of a too...)

Now, the question in your post is something differnet.

The #nav ul li a is setting all the anchors (a) in the menu inside the element called #nav. For this reason, the a:visited part listed here is useless-- it will already be #000 (black) and not underlined anyway because it's already set for all anchors using "a".

This part, the coder is overriding the basic styles for :hover so that the buttons or whatever they are look different when someone hovers. Makes sense. The other two look like a "You Are Here" style-- meaning that in the whole menu, there is a menu item that should always look hovered-- even if it's been visited before. So there's a class on a single menu item called .current_page_item showing the visitor which page they're on by giving that item a highlight.

To make that change with every page (since it should be on a different menu item on different pages), lots of people use an id on the body. body id="home" or whatever, then the Home button on the menu would have the current_page_item class on it, and would tell visitors that they were back on the Home page. For instance.

Quote:but these code doesn't

Posted: Mon, 2008-05-19 04:17

They do, you are correct. You do NOT need all those declarations because "a" will make the rest the same. You only need to list :hover, :visited, etc. IF you want them different.

I think maybe you have all these extra declarations because this is a template. The writers of templates don't know what you will want to change, so they write all this extra code so that, if you wanted to change .current_page_item's :visited state, for example, then it's already there for you to edit.

But it's bloated code. This is why I don't like templates : ) They want to be flexible for the people who buy them. I want MY code to be lean : )