[html] Disable color change of anchor tag when visited

I have to disable the color change of an anchor tag when visited. I did this:

a:visited{ color: gray }

(The link is gray in color before visited.) But this is a way where I explicitly state the color after the link is visited, which is again a color change.

How can I disable the color change of an anchor tag when visited without doing any explicit color changes?

This question is related to html css anchor

The answer is


If you use some pre-processor like SASS, you can use @extend feature:

a:visited {
  @extend a;
}

As a result you will see automatically-added a:visited selector for every style with a selector, so be carefully with it, because your style-table may be increase in size very much.

As a compromise you can add @extend only in those block wich you really need.


I think if I set a color for a:visited it is not good: you must know the default color of tag a and every time synchronize it with a:visited.

I don't want know about the default color (it can be set in common.css of your application, or you can using outside styles).

I think it's nice solution:

HTML:

<body>
    <a class="absolute">Test of URL</a>
    <a class="unvisited absolute" target="_blank" href="google.ru">Test of URL</a>
</body>

CSS:

.absolute{
    position: absolute;
}
a.unvisited, a.unvisited:visited, a.unvisited:active{
    text-decoration: none;
    color: transparent;
}

For those who are dynamically applying classes (i.e. active): Simply add a "div" tag inside the "a" tag with an href attribute:

<a href='your-link'>
  <div>
    <span>your link name</span>
  </div>
</a>

Either delete the selector or set it to the same color as your text appears normally.


Use:

a:visited {
    text-decoration: none;
}

But it will only affect links that haven't been clicked on yet.


a {
    color: orange !important;
}

!important has the effect that the property in question cannot be overridden unless another !important is used. It is generally considered bad practice to use !important unless absolutely necessary; however, I can't think of any other way of ‘disabling’ :visited using CSS only.


If you just want the anchor color to stay the same as the anchor's parent element you can leverage inherit:

a, a:visited, a:hover, a:active {
  color: inherit;
}

Notice there is no need to repeat the rule for each selector; just use a comma separated list of selectors (order matters for anchor pseudo elements). Also, you can apply the pseudo selectors to a class if you want to selectively disable the special anchor colors:

.special-link, .special-link:visited, .special-link:hover, .special-link:active {
  color: inherit;
}

Your question only asks about the visited state, but I assumed you meant all of the states. You can remove the other selectors if you want to allow color changes on all but visited.


For :hover to override :visited, and to make sure :visited is the same as the initial color, :hover must come after :visited.

So if you want to disable the color change, a:visited must come before a:hover. Like this:

a { color: gray; }
a:visited { color: orange; }
a:hover { color: red; }

To disable :visited change you would style it with non-pseudo class:

a, a:visited { color: gray; }
a:hover { color: red; }

You can solve this issue by calling a:link and a:visited selectors together. And follow it with a:hover selector.

a:link, a:visited
{color: gray;}
a:hover
{color: skyblue;}

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