CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cssanchorvisited
johnny
johnny

Reputation: 19755

Why doesn't this a:visited css style work?

Is there any reason why this does not work on Internet Explorer or Chrome:

<html>
    <head>
        <style>
            A {font-weight: bold; color:black;}
            A:visited {font-weight: normal; color: black; }
            .Empty {font-weight: bold; color: black; }
        </style>
    </head>

    <body>
        <a href="http://mysite">click me</a>
    </body>
</html>

The link I click never goes to normal and just stays bold. On some other browsers it works.

Changing case did not affect it. Changing a to a:link did not affect it. Changing color works, just not font-weight.

One workaround was to change accessibility to ignore web colors. I do not have access to the source, so I had to do it this way.

Upvotes: 23

Views: 31989

Answers (6)

music
music

Reputation: 219

One useful attribute that does work with :visited is background-color. So try:

:visited {background-color:red;}

:visited also works on non-a elements.

Upvotes: 2

duri
duri

Reputation: 15351

Actually, this has nothing to do with case sensitivity. This is a security feature. The functionality of :visited pseudoclass has been restricted in many modern browsers (Fx4, IE9, Chrome) to prevent CSS exploit: read about it here.

Nowadays, getComputedStyle() in these browsers usually returns values for visited links as if they weren't visited. However, I can simply imagine circumventing of that: using font-weight for visited links, the element's width changes so browsers that would allow changing font-weight for :visited links wouldn't actually fix the security hole.

You can see there are some specific things browsers do to protect against this:

  • The window.getComputedStyle method, and similar functions such as element.querySelector, will always return values indicating that a user has never visited any of the links on a page.
  • If you use a sibling selector such as :visited + span, the adjacent element (span in this example) will be styled as if the link were unvisited.
  • In rare scenarios, if you're using nested link elements and the element being matched is different from the link whose presence in history is being tested, the element will be rendered as if the link were unvisited, as well.

Thus, there's no workaround for this issue.

Upvotes: 43

Ernie
Ernie

Reputation: 1000

The problem has to do with history sniffing, changing css properties is disabled for visited links due to privacy issues.

I came up with the following workaround to reach the desired effect. It is possible to change the background-color of the visited link.

The solution is very simple:

  1. set a background-image on the link with the same height as your link and 1px width and repeat the image horizontally
  2. the image has the same color as the background of the link
  3. make one pixel of that image transparent, in the vertical middle
  4. on :visited state just change the backgroundcolor of that link to the text-color of the link
  5. Only one line of the background-color wil be visible, because the background-image is masking it

Here's an example:

a:link {
    color:#000;
    background:#FFF url('../img/linethrough.png') repeat-x top left;
}

a:visited {
    background-color:#000;
    color:#000;
}

Upvotes: 1

Tuck
Tuck

Reputation: 203

You need to have separate declarations for a:link, a:visited, a:active, etc.

Remove your first style that does not contain a colon. It's overriding. Replace with a:link.

Upvotes: -3

Chris C
Chris C

Reputation: 2013

CSS itself is not case-sensitive, but if the HTML file using this style has an XML declaration and an XHTML doctype, that CSS is not going to work, because tags are case-sensitive. You'll have to set the "a" tags to lower-case.

Explained here: http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/casesensitivity

Upvotes: 0

hendrikswan
hendrikswan

Reputation: 2341

Perhaps try changing the color attribute and see whether that has an effect at all.

To troubleshoot, you might want to try to utilize the developer tools in chrome to see what style is applied.

Upvotes: -1

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