CSS a:link keep original color

Question

Is it possible to tell a link not to change color in CSS and use the default one.

Example

I have a text in red and that text is a link too. Normaly that text

Answer 1

If all of your a tags are contained within a paragraph tag you can just set the color of the a tag to inherit. You could also just set a style for all a tags to have whatever colour the paragraph tag has. A quick warning about inherit, there are older versions of IE which don't support it(IE7 and earlier).

Answer 2

Try this in your stylesheet:

a:link {
   color:inherit;
}

Note that you then probably should make sure you have some other way to identify links, or your users will be confused. (I.e. don't remove the underlining, too.)

If you want to deal with browsers not supporting inherit, I suppose repeating the definition which originally set your color will do.

As an example, assume the class important should be shown in red:

.important {
    color:red;
}

.important a:link {
    color:red;
}

But of course it is not nice to have to double all color indications. I assume one could do something in JavaScript (looping through all the a elements and giving them the right class explicitly). (I have no IE available to test this.)