Changing Link Colors on an HTML page

A reader writes:

“I was hoping you could tell me where I can find info to solve a problem I’m having with one of the pages. I want my hyperlinks to stay the same colour as the rest of the text and not change at all, and i’d like to avoid the underlining too.”

This is a common question and one that’s addressed in Creating Cool HTML 4 Web Pages.

There are a couple of ways to solve this, ranging from the banal and old fashioned LINK and VLINK attributes to the BODY tag (as in <BODY LINK="black"> to have text links black if not visited) to the more advanced style sheets, where you can have structures like:

a { color: black; text-decoration:none; } a:hover { text-decoration: underline; }

which would give you black links without underlines, with the underline only showing up at the ‘hover’, when the cursor is immediately over the link text.

I hope that helps!