Is there a reason to use a instead of a:link or a:visited in my stylesheet?

Question

Can anyone tell me if there\'s any reason to use a {} instead of (or adjacent to) a:link, a:visited {} in my stylesheet? I\'ve had inconsistent re

Answer 1

There are two cases where an a may not have an href property. The first is regular anchors (i.e. ) and the second is pure Javascript interaction (i.e. ). Those are not 'links' and shouldn't be styled the same.

EDIT: To clarify, a:link is pretty much equivalent to a[href] (I believe the former notation existed before the attribute selectors were available or standardized). So a reason to use a instead of a:link would be if you wanted all anchor tags styled the same. The default styles in some browsers display the two differently - such as underlines only applied to a:link and not to a.