Nifty CSS Link Hover Effect

This nifty CSS link hover effect magically reveals a hidden span of text after specified links. The trick employs an anonymous span nested within an anchor tag. CSS then acts upon the markup with a set of rules that basically says hide the nested span until the link is hovered.

Here is the CSS code and XHTML markup that makes it happen:

a:link, a:visited {
	text-decoration: underline;
	color: #990000;
}

a:hover, a:active {
	text-decoration: none;
	color: #990000;
}

li a:link span, li a:visited span {
	display: none;
}

li a:hover span, li a:active span {
	display: inline;
}

<ul>
	<li><a href="#">Here is a nice link <span> » select this item</span></a></li>
	<li><a href="#">Here is a nice link <span> » select this item</span></a></li>
	<li><a href="#">Here is a nice link <span> » select this item</span></a></li>
</ul>

About the Author

Jeff Starr = Web Developer. Security Specialist. WordPress Buff.