Always style links with a pseudo-class

I remember I used to wonder why we have the :link pseudo-class in CSS; why not just use the a element selector? Aren’t they doing the same thing? Turns out they’re not.

<a> elements without an href don’t have any semantic value and, by default, browsers:

• match their styling to their surrounding text
• don’t include them in the page’s tab index
• prevent them being clickable/actionable

If we were to style an href-less <a> element, we’d be telling our visitors that the <a> element was in some way different from the text it’s within. It wouldn’t be.

MDN Docs describes the :link pseudo-class like this:

The :link CSS pseudo-class represents an element that has not yet been visited. It matches every unvisited <a> … element that has an href attribute.

So if we want to change default link styling we should be targeting :link in our CSS, not a.

Don’t do this:

a {
  /* Link styles go here */
}

Do do this:

:link {
  /* Link styles go here */
}