Question

I have some link styles for our website and the CSS is as follows:

a:link {
    font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif;
    text-decoration: none;
    color: #0676b3;
}

a:visited {
    color: #666;
    text-decoration: underline;
}

a:hover {
    color: #fff;
    background: #A5C2DB;
    border-radius: .1875em;
    padding: 0 .1875em;
}

Here is a jsfiddle to show how they are supposed to look in their different states:

a {
  display: inline-block;
  margin: 10px;
}
/*  these styles are for presentation of the link states they are NOT the styles in my stylesheet*/

a.link {
  font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif;
  font-size: .875em;
  text-decoration: none;
  color: #0676b3;
}
a.visited {
  color: #666;
  text-decoration: underline;
}
a.hover {
  color: #fff;
  background: #A5C2DB;
  border-radius: 0.1875em;
  padding: 0 0.1875em;
}

<a class="link">Regular Link</a>
<br />
<a class="visited">Visited Link</a>
<br />
<a class="hover">Hovered Link</a>

:link = blue text no decoration

:visited = grey text underlined

:hover = white text with light blue background

The :link and :hover work fine but for some reason the :visited state refuses to show the underline. in Chrome and Firefox using firebug or the inspector I can see the :visited style in action and the text is grey in color, only it refuses the underline state.

Any ideas on what I’m doing wrong?

Answer 1

You’re not doing anything wrong – it just doesn’t work that way (anymore). Styling of :visited was used as a security hole, so browser manufacturers basically eliminated alternate styling for :visited except for a handful of properties (e.g. ‘color’, ‘background-color’)

See: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-coming-to-css-vistited/