What's the :Any-Link Pseudo-Class For

What's the :any-link pseudo-class for?

:any-link is a new pseudo-class proposed in Selectors level 4, that matches all elements that would be matched by :link, :visited. From what I see, its main purpose is to simplify selectors that need to select any hyperlinks, since the naming of :link is misleading; it specifically means unvisited links only, rather than all hyperlinks (which makes it essentially the opposite of :visited).

For the purposes of :link and :visited, WHATWG HTML and W3C HTML5 both define a "hyperlink" as any one of:

An <a> element that has an href attribute. This excludes named anchors (that is, <a> elements without an href attribute but instead with a name attribute), which were used traditionally to mark anchors in a page, now superseded by the use of an id attribute on any element. See named anchors in HTML 4.
An <area> element that has an href attribute.
A <link> element that has an href attribute.

For example, consider a scenario where links in the page header should be colored differently from all other links:

body > header > a:link, body > header > a:visited {
    color: white;
}

Notice the body > header part is duplicated across both selectors. This seems redundant, but is currently necessary in order to color links in the page header differently from the rest, but regardless of their visited state. This is because body > header > a is not specific enough which requires using !important to override anyway, and body > header > a:link troublesomely only applies to unvisited links.

With the :any-link pseudo-class, you can simply do this instead:

body > header > a:any-link {
    color: white;
}

Specificity is exactly the same as with each individual half, so there should be no issues there.

Of course, since no browser implements it unprefixed yet, that won't work. As an alternative, considering you're most likely working with an HTML document anyway you can just use a[href] instead, which works in all browsers including IE7+ on top of also being equally specific:

body > header > a[href] {
    color: white;
}

There's a much more elaborate explanation regarding the use of a versus a:link, a:visited versus a:any-link versus a[href] in this other answer of mine.

Like anything else that has a prefix in CSS, :-moz-any-link and :-webkit-any-link exist only for experimental purposes, so you shouldn't use them with your sites. Besides, even if you were to use them right now, you'd have to duplicate the rules themselves (and not just the selectors!) since browsers have to drop entire rules on unrecognized selectors, rendering them pretty useless in real-world code!

As of early 2013, no other implementations of :any-link exist that I know of. I'm unsure as well as to whether this was implemented by the respective vendors and then proposed for inclusion in Selectors 4, or if it was preliminarily specced before the vendors began implementing it, but I don't think that matters.

Speaking of which, be sure not to confuse the :-moz-any-link/:-webkit-any-link pseudo-class with :-moz-any()/:-webkit-any(), the latter of which is specced as :matches() instead (possibly to avoid naming confusion?).

What's the point of the :link pseudo-class?

The a:link selector lets you set the styles on <a> tags that actually link somewhere.

Bare <a> tags without an href attribute are traditionally used as markers in a document; setting the location to document.html#foo will jump you to wherever <a id="foo"> is in the document. It is, after all, called an "anchor" tag for a reason.

Traditional HTML may look something like this:

<h2>Navigation</h2>
<a href="#ch1">Chapter 1</a>

...

<h3><a id="ch1">Chapter 1</a></h3>
<p>It was the best of times...</p>

Subsequent HTML standards let you use the document.html#thing syntax to jump to any element with the attribute id="thing", but it wasn't always the case.

CSS pseudo class :link not supported. Is there any equivalent?

Theoretically, in selectors-4 you can write :any-link:not(:visited), but you are going to be hard-pressed to find any browsers that support :visited but not :link, let alone :any-link, browser regressions notwithstanding.

A slightly more widely-supported selector requires knowledge of the document language since the link pseudo-classes themselves match different elements based on document semantics. In HTML, :link can be expressed as the following level 3 selector-list:

a[href]:not(:visited), area[href]:not(:visited), link[href]:not(:visited)

The same caveat applies.

If you're asking about browsers that support neither of the link pseudo-classes, remove the :not(:visited) from the above selector-list. If you're asking how to match links based on their visitedness in browsers that support neither pseudo-class, then it becomes impossible. But there are no known browsers that lack support for the link pseudo-classes, so this will never be a problem if you're making websites.

Note that CSS1 and CSS2.1 define :link and :visited to apply only to a elements — the standalone Selectors standard (level 3 and up) instead defers to the document language, and in the case of HTML, the current definition above is provided by HTML5. What this means in theory is that browsers up to and including IE6 (not sure about IE7) don't support the link pseudo-classes on elements other than a[href], and that's because IE6 was designed to be CSS1-compliant, not CSS2-compliant.

What this means in practice depends on whether or not you use the link pseudo-classes to match area or link elements, and whether or not you support browsers dating back to IE7, in the first place. If you're like 99.9% of authors who don't use them with area or link elements, then this means absolutely nothing to you in practice.

What is the correct way? CSS Link Pseudo-Class

Whenever in doubt go to the specs. And here's an excerpt from the specs.

Note that the A:hover must be placed after the A:link and A:visited
rules, since otherwise the cascading rules will hide the 'color'
property of the A:hover rule

What you have is correct

a:link, a:visited, a:active {
   color: #006699;
   text-decoration: none;
}

a:hover {
   color: #2089CC;
   text-decoration: underline;
}

That's why this works.

This below would be incorrect.

a:hover {
   color: #2089CC;
   text-decoration: underline;
}

a:link, a:visited, a:active {
   color: #006699;
   text-decoration: none;
}

That's why this doesn't work.

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

This is of course assuming there would never be a reason to use an <a> tag without an href value. Maybe that's a mistaken assumption.

It depends on your project. Strictly speaking, that is a mistaken assumption, as not every <a> element needs to have a href attribute. Indeed, it's still not required in HTML5 to specify href for every <a>. Chris Blake and Ryan P mention named anchors, and I'll add that while the name attribute for <a> has been made obsolete as of HTML5, named anchors are still rife and will continue to be, simply by legacy and tradition.

That said, going forward, authors are recommended to use id attributes and not named anchors to designate document anchor fragments.

Also, <a> elements that lack href attributes but have onclick attributes for JavaScript are a mess. Even if you insist on using onclick to bind events, for the sake of graceful degradation you should at least point it somewhere using href.

But to make things simple, let's assume that you won't be writing <a> elements without href attributes.

With this in mind, going back to the CSS selectors, there are two important points to consider:

Are they the same?

No, the selectors a and a:link, a:visited are not strictly equivalent. I'll quote a previous answer of mine on this topic:

The selector a should match any <a> elements, while a:link only matches <a> elements that are unvisited hyperlinks (the HTML 4 document type defines hyperlinks as <a> elements with a href attribute). Nowhere does it state in either specification that a should automatically translate to a:link or vice versa.

In other words, in HTML, a:link, a:visited (in CSS1) is strictly equivalent to a[href] (in CSS2 with an attribute selector) or a:any-link (new in Selectors level 4), rather than a. Note that it doesn't matter whether the attribute has a value or not, as long as it is present the pseudo-classes will match, hence [href]. Note also that this is true for all current standards of HTML, and I believe this includes HTML5, since as mentioned above href is not a required attribute in any existing spec.

Just bear in mind, that other languages may define completely different semantics for :link and :visited — it just so happens that they coincide with an equally specific selector in HTML, which is covered next...

Specificity

This is a huge gotcha: a is less specific than either a:link or a:visited, which is a very common source of specificity problems that are particularly evident when applying styles to a, a:link and a:visited separately. This then leads to all kinds of !important hacks to get around a lack of understanding of specificity.

For example, consider this CSS:

/* All unvisited links should be red */
a:link {
    color: red;
}

/* All visited links should be slightly darker */
a:visited {
    color: maroon;
}

/* But no matter what, header links must be white at all times! */
body > header > a {
    color: white;
}

This doesn't work as expected, because a:link and a:visited (what I call generalized rules/selectors) are more specific than body > header > a (what I call a specialized rule/selector), so header links will in fact never be white:

/* 1 pseudo-class, 1 type  -> specificity = (0,1,1) */
a:link, a:visited

/* 3 types                 -> specificity = (0,0,3) */
body > header > a

Now the first thing that comes to mind for most CSS coders is to throw in !important, trumping specificity altogether:

body > header > a {
    color: white !important;
}

But that gets you all kinds of bad rep, right? So let's not do that.

Selectors level 4 gives you not one, but two solutions to this specificity problem. These solutions, new as they are, aren't supported in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge Legacy (the UWP/EdgeHTML/not-Chromium one), but thankfully there is a third solution that works in Internet Explorer 7 and later, which is a[href], the attribute selector I mentioned above.

1. The `:any-link` pseudo-class

:any-link has some history behind it which you can read in my answer to this question, but practically speaking, :any-link serves as a catch-all for :link, :visited. Its main purpose is to eliminate selector duplication, and for that reason there is in fact an equivalent in the form of :is(:link, :visited).

You can use a:any-link in your specialized rule to match the specificity of the generalized a:link and a:visited rules, thereby allowing it to override them:

a:link {
    color: red;
}

a:visited {
    color: maroon;
}

/* 1 pseudo-class, 3 types -> specificity = (0,1,3) */
body > header > a:any-link {
    color: white;
}

2. The `:where()` pseudo-class

:where() also has some history behind it, but essentially it's an analogue to :is() with the exception that it zeroes out the specificity of its argument. See my answer to this question for an in-depth guide to how it works.

You can wrap the :link and :visited pseudo-classes in :where()s to remove their pseudo-class specificity, thereby allowing them to be overridden by the specialized rule:

/* 1 type                  -> specificity = (0,0,1) */
a:where(:link) {
    color: red;
}

/* 1 type                  -> specificity = (0,0,1) */
a:where(:visited) {
    color: maroon;
}

/* 3 types                 -> specificity = (0,0,3) */
body > header > a {
    color: white;
}

3. `a[href]` (for older browsers)

Fortunately, if you need to support older browsers, an attribute selector is as specific as a pseudo-class. This means you can use a[href] to mean both/either a:link and/or a:visited, and not run into specificity issues because they are equally specific!

/* 1 attribute, 3 types    -> specificity = (0,1,3) */
body > header > a[href] {
    color: white;
}

So which selector(s) to use?

This is all still incredibly subjective, but I follow these personal rules of thumb:

Apply to a styles that do not depend on the state of a link (i.e. as long as it's a link will do).
Apply to a:link and a:visited styles where it does matter whether a link is visited or not.
Taking into account the specificity problems mentioned above, do not mix any declarations between both a and a:link/a:visited rules. If I need to apply the same property to both states somewhere, but I already have it in separate a:link and a:visited rules, I'll use one of the 3 options above to avoid specificity problems.

For example, here are the link styles I used in my site's Coming Soon page prior to its launch:

a {
    text-decoration: none;
    transition: text-shadow 0.15s linear;
}

a:link {
    color: rgb(119, 255, 221);
}

a:visited {
    color: rgb(68, 204, 170);
}

a:hover, a:active {
    text-shadow: 0 0 0.5em currentColor;
}

a:focus {
    outline: thin dotted;
}

/* ... */

footer a:link, footer a:visited {
    color: rgb(71, 173, 153);
}

The text-shadow transition is defined for all a elements, regardless of whether they are visited or not, because the transition only takes effect when one of them is moused over and clicked (corresponding to the a:hover, a:active rule).

Now, I want visited links to have a slightly darker shade than unvisited links, so I put the colors in separate a:link and a:visited rules. However, for some reason, I want footer links to appear the same color whether they're visited or not.

If I use footer a, I'll run into the specificity problems described above, so I choose footer a:link, footer a:visited instead. This was for legacy reasons (as you'll see below, I originally posted this in 2012!), but of course it can be shortened to footer a:any-link. However, the specificity-matching principle applies all the same.

Hopefully my advice helps you get a handle on the mess that is link styles.

Why bother with the L in the LVHA link styles?

Not all anchor tags necessarily have a href attribute, so they're not all links. Presumably the :link pseudoclass does not apply to anchor tags without a href.

The :link pseudo-class does match visited links

It's a bit confusing but if you refer to the specification you will find:

UAs may therefore treat all links as unvisited links, or implement other measures to preserve the user's privacy while rendering visited and unvisited links differently.

This is what is happening here. The trick is to create some restrictions to avoid having a big difference between the styles of visited and unvisited links.

Technically, all the styles you will apply to a:link will also apply to a:visited unless you override them inside a:visited and you are limited to the styles that you can apply inside :visited so you cannot override everything:

You can style visited links, but there are limits to which styles you can use. Only the following styles can be applied to visited links:
color
background-color
border-color (and its sub-properties)
column-rule-color
outline-color
The color parts of the fill and stroke attributes
In addition, even for the above styles, you won't be able to change the transparency between unvisited and visited links, as you otherwise would be able to using rgba(), hsla(), or the transparent keyword. ^ref

Here is an example to illustrate:

a:link {
  font-size:50px;
  border:2px solid red;
  color:black;
  padding:20px;
  box-shadow:5px 5px 0 blue;
  display:inline-block;
  margin:10px;
}
a:visited {
 color:red; /* this will work */
 border:5px dotted green; /* only the color will work */
 background:black; /* This will not work because we cannot change transparent to opaque value */
 
 /*All the below will not work*/
  padding:0;
  box-shadow:-5px -5px 0 purple;
  display:inline;
  margin:9584px;
  font-size:10px;
}

<a href="www.something.comg">not visited</a>

<a href="#">visited</a>

CSS: a:link vs just a (without the :link part)

:link selects unvisited links, that is: anchors with an href attribute which have not been visited by the browser (for whatever definition the browser vendor has for "visited").

If it has :link then it will never match <h1><a name="foo">A foo to be linked to</a></h1>

(Although you should be using <h1 id="foo">A foo to be linked to</h1> these days.)

Aside from that, it does make it clearer what it is for.

a         { color: orange }

a:link    { color: blue }    

a:visited { color: indigo }  

a:hover   { color: green } 

a:active  { color: lime }

  <a>my anchor without href</a>

  <br><br>

  <a href="http://somelinkhere.com">my anchor without href</a>

What's the :Any-Link Pseudo-Class For