[thelist] Swish... > Critiques Update

[equilonmrc]

Sharon,

> The correct display of colors should be link=blue; visited link=red,
> activated link=black and hover=black (no underline).
>
> Now, I.E. 5.x displays everything properly, NN4.x does too (of course,
> without the hover showing), BUT Netscape 6.x no longer shows my visited
link
> color (red) <sigh>. I decided to leave it as it now is
>
> Any thoughts?

    It depends on the effect that you want. Do you want visited links to also display hover properties? Or, once a link has been visited, do you want it to do nothing when it is hovered over?
    Remember that in CSS, later declarations take precedence over earlier declarations. If you place visited before hover, even visited links will show hover properties when they are hovered over; if you place visited after hover, visited links will not display hover properties when they are hovered over.
    Similarly, if you want your active state to display at all, it must follow hover, since the link is still in hover state (the mouse is still hovering over it) even when it is activated (meaning, when it is clicked -- unless the link is activated through the keyboard instead of the mouse).
    For usability purposes, it is probably best to have visited links also display hover properties when they are hovered over to prevent user confusion over whether they are still valid links.
    So, with all that said, for most purposes the correct order for anchor pseudo classes is:

link
visited
hover
active

    For further info, see the W3C CSS 2 recommendation [1].

James Aylard

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/selector.html#dynamic-pseudo-classes