Recipe 3.3 Setting Style Decorations Other Than Underlines

Problem

You want to differentiate the links from the main text in a document, but you don't want to use underlines. Figure 3-2 shows the links emboldened with a different background color.

Figure 3-2. Multiple styles applied to links

Solution

Use the text-decoration property to eliminate underlining, while setting other style decorations:

a:link, a:visited {
 text-decoration: none;
 font-weight: bold;
 color: #999;
 background-color: #666;
}

Discussion

It's common for developers to set a color for the links that works in harmony with the design of the web page. In the preceding code, the font-weight property applies a bold font to the link text, the color property changes the color of the text to a light gray, and the background-color property applies a gray background color to the links.

See Also

Color scheme applications like Pixy's Color Scheme at http://pixy.cz/apps/barvy/index-en.html, or ColorMatch 5K, an easy-to-use web application for choosing colors, at http://www.colormatch.dk/.