Styling links

We looked at how links are implemented in your HTML according to best practices in Creating hyperlinks. In this article we'll build on this knowledge, showing you the best practices for styling them.

The first thing to understand is the concept of link states — different states that links can exist in. These can be styled using different pseudo-classes:

• Link: A link that has a destination (i.e., not just a named anchor), styled using the :link pseudo class.
• Visited: A link that has already been visited (exists in the browser's history), styled using the :visited pseudo class.
• Hover: A link that is hovered over by a user's mouse pointer, styled using the :hover pseudo class.
• Focus: A link that is focused (e.g., moved to by a keyboard user using the Tab key or something similar, or programmatically focused using HTMLElement.focus()) — this is styled using the :focus pseudo class.
• Active: A link that is activated (e.g., clicked on), styled using the :active pseudo class.

The example below illustrates what a link will look and behave like by default; though the CSS is enlarging and centering the text to make it stand out more. You can compare the look and behavior of the default stylings in the example with the look and behavior of other links on this page which have more CSS styles applied. Default links have the following properties:

• Links are underlined.

• Unvisited links are blue.

• Visited links are purple.

• Hovering a link makes the mouse pointer change to a little hand icon.

• Focused links have an outline around them — you should be able to focus on the links on this page with the keyboard by pressing the tab key.

• Active links are red. Try holding down the mouse button on the link as you click it.

<p><a href="#">A simple link</a></p>

p {
  font-size: 2rem;
  text-align: center;
}

Interestingly enough, these default styles are nearly the same as they were back in the early days of browsers in the mid-1990s. This is because users know and have come to expect this behavior — if links were styled differently, it would confuse a lot of people. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't style links at all. It just means that you shouldn't stray too far from the expected behavior. You should at least:

• Use underlining for links, but not for other things. If you don't want to underline links, at least highlight them in some other way.
• Make them react in some way when hovered/focused, and in a slightly different way when activated.

The default styles can be turned off/changed using the following CSS properties:

• color for the text color.
• cursor for the mouse pointer style — you shouldn't turn this off unless you've got a very good reason.
• outline for the text outline. An outline is similar to a border. The only difference is that a border takes up space in the box and an outline doesn't; it just sits over the top of the background. The outline is a useful accessibility aid, so should not be removed without adding another method of indicating the focused link.

Now that we've looked at the default states in some detail, let's look at a typical set of link styles.

To start off with, we'll write out our empty rulesets:

a {
}

a:link {
}

a:visited {
}

a:focus {
}

a:hover {
}

a:active {
}

This order is important because link styles build on one another. For example, the styles in the first rule will apply to all the subsequent ones. When a link is activated, it's usually also hovered over. If you put these in the wrong order, and you're changing the same properties in each ruleset, things won't work as you expect. To remember the order, you could try using a mnemonic like LoVe Fears HAte.

Now let's add some more information to get this styled properly:

body {
  width: 300px;
  margin: 0 auto;
  font-size: 1.2rem;
  font-family: sans-serif;
}

p {
  line-height: 1.4;
}

a {
  outline-color: transparent;
}

a:link {
  color: #6900ff;
}

a:visited {
  color: #a5c300;
}

a:focus {
  text-decoration: none;
  background: #bae498;
}

a:hover {
  text-decoration: none;
  background: #cdfeaa;
}

a:active {
  background: #6900ff;
  color: #cdfeaa;
}

We'll also provide some sample HTML to apply the CSS to:

<p>
  There are several browsers available, such as <a href="#">Mozilla Firefox</a>,
  <a href="#">Google Chrome</a>, and <a href="#">Microsoft Edge</a>.
</p>

Putting the two together gives us this result:

So what did we do here? This certainly looks different to the default styling, but it still provides a familiar enough experience for users to know what's going on:

• The first two rules are not that interesting to this discussion.
• The third rule uses the a selector to get rid of the focus outline (which varies across browsers anyway).
• Next, we use the a:link and a:visited selectors to set a couple of color variations on unvisited and visited links, so they are distinct.
• The next two rules use a:focus and a:hover to set focused and hovered links to have no underline and different background colors.
• Finally, a:active is used to give the links an inverted color scheme while they are being activated, to make it clear something important is happening!

In this active learning session, we'd like you to take our empty set of rules and add your own declarations to make the links look really cool. Use your imagination, go wild. We are sure you can come up with something cooler and just as functional as our example above.

If you make a mistake, you can always reset it using the Reset button. If you get really stuck, press the Show solution button to insert the example we showed above.

<div
  class="body-wrapper"
  style="font-family: 'Open Sans Light',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;">
  <h2>HTML Input</h2>
  <textarea
    id="code"
    class="html-input"
    style="width: 90%;height: 10em;padding: 10px;border: 1px solid #0095dd;">
<p>There are several browsers available, such as <a href="#">Mozilla
 Firefox</a>, <a href="#">Google Chrome</a>, and
<a href="#">Microsoft Edge</a>.</p>
  </textarea>

  <h2>CSS Input</h2>
  <textarea
    id="code"
    class="css-input"
    style="width: 90%;height: 10em;padding: 10px;border: 1px solid #0095dd;">
a {

}

a:link {

}

a:visited {

}

a:focus {

}

a:hover {

}

a:active {

}
  </textarea>

  <h2>Output</h2>
  <div
    class="output"
    style="width: 90%;height: 10em;padding: 10px;border: 1px solid #0095dd;"></div>
  <div class="controls">
    <input
      id="reset"
      type="button"
      value="Reset"
      style="margin: 10px 10px 0 0;" />
    <input
      id="solution"
      type="button"
      value="Show solution"
      style="margin: 10px 0 0 10px;" />
  </div>
</div>

const htmlInput = document.querySelector(".html-input");
const cssInput = document.querySelector(".css-input");
const reset = document.getElementById("reset");
const htmlCode = htmlInput.value;
const cssCode = cssInput.value;
const output = document.querySelector(".output");
const solution = document.getElementById("solution");

const styleElem = document.createElement("style");
const headElem = document.querySelector("head");
headElem.appendChild(styleElem);

function drawOutput() {
  output.innerHTML = htmlInput.value;
  styleElem.textContent = cssInput.value;
}

reset.addEventListener("click", () => {
  htmlInput.value = htmlCode;
  cssInput.value = cssCode;
  drawOutput();
});

solution.addEventListener("click", () => {
  htmlInput.value = htmlCode;
  cssInput.value = `p {
  font-size: 1.2rem;
  font-family: sans-serif;
  line-height: 1.4;
}

a {
  outline-color: transparent;
  text-decoration: none;
  padding: 2px 1px 0;
}

a:link {
  color: #265301;
}

a:visited {
  color: #437A16;
}

a:focus {
  border-bottom: 1px solid;
  background: #BAE498;
}

a:hover {
  border-bottom: 1px solid;
  background: #CDFEAA;
}

a:active {
  background: #265301;
  color: #CDFEAA;
}`;
  drawOutput();
});

htmlInput.addEventListener("input", drawOutput);
cssInput.addEventListener("input", drawOutput);
window.addEventListener("load", drawOutput);

A common practice is to include icons on links to provide more of an indicator as to what kind of content the link points to. Let's look at a really simple example that adds an icon to external links (links that lead to other sites). Such an icon usually looks like a little arrow pointing out of a box. For this example, we'll use external link icon from icons8.com.

Let's look at some HTML and CSS that will give us the effect we want. First, some simple HTML to style:

<p>
  For more information on the weather, visit our <a href="#">weather page</a>,
  look at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/">weather on Wikipedia</a>, or check
  out
  <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.org/topics/resource-library-weather/">
    weather on National Geographic</a>.
</p>

Next, the CSS:

body {
  width: 300px;
  margin: 0 auto;
  font-family: sans-serif;
}

a[href^="http"]::after {
  content: "";
  display: inline-block;
  width: 0.8em;
  height: 0.8em;
  margin-left: 0.25em;

  background-size: 100%;
  background-image: url("external-link-52.png");
}

So what's going on here? We'll skip over most of the CSS, as it's just the same information you've looked at before. The last rule, however, is interesting: we're using ::after pseudo-element. The 0.8rem x 0.8rem pseudo-element gets put after the anchor text as an inline block. And the icon is being rendered as background of the pseudo-element.

We've used a relative unit em. It sizes the icon in proportion to the anchor's text size. If the text size of the anchor changes the icon size also adjusts accordingly.

A final word: how did we select just external links? Well, if you are writing your HTML links properly, you should only be using absolute URLs for external links — it is more efficient to use relative links to link to other parts of your own site (as with the first link). The text "http" should therefore only appear in external links (like the second and third ones), and we can select this with an attribute selector: a[href^="http"] selects <a> elements, but only if they have an href attribute with a value that begins with "http".

So that's it. Try revisiting the active learning section above and trying this new technique out!

The tools you've explored so far in this article can also be used in other ways. For example, states like hover can be used to style many different elements, not just links — you might want to style the hover state of paragraphs, list items, or other things.

In addition, links are quite commonly styled to look and behave like buttons in certain circumstances. A website navigation menu can be marked up as a set of links, and this can be styled to look like a set of control buttons or tabs that provide the user with access to other parts of the site. Let's explore how.

First, some HTML:

<nav class="container">
  <a href="#">Home</a>
  <a href="#">Pizza</a>
  <a href="#">Music</a>
  <a href="#">Wombats</a>
  <a href="#">Finland</a>
</nav>

And now our CSS:

body,
html {
  margin: 0;
  font-family: sans-serif;
}

.container {
  display: flex;
  gap: 0.625%;
}

a {
  flex: 1;
  text-decoration: none;
  outline-color: transparent;
  text-align: center;
  line-height: 3;
  color: black;
}

a:link,
a:visited,
a:focus {
  background: palegoldenrod;
  color: black;
}

a:hover {
  background: orange;
}

a:active {
  background: darkred;
  color: white;
}

This gives us the following result:

The HTML defines a <nav> element with a "container" class. The <nav> contains our links.

The CSS includes the styling for the container and the links it contains.

• The second rule says:
  • The container is a flexbox. The items it contains — the links, in this case — will be flex items.
  • The gap between the flex items will be 0.625% of the container's width.
• The third rule styles the links:
  • The first declaration, flex: 1, means that the widths of the items will be adjusted so they use all the available space in the container.
  • Next, we turn off the default text-decoration and outline — we don't want those spoiling our look.
  • The last three declarations are to center the text inside each link, set the line-height to 3 to give the buttons some height (which also has the advantage of centering the text vertically), and set the text color to black.

We hope this article has provided you with all you'll need to know about links — for now! The final article in our Styling text module details how to use custom fonts on your websites (or web fonts, as they are better known).

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