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I have what a former professor of mine called fear of the “fraud squad.” Today’s example: if someone looking at my CSS asked me to articulate the difference between a and a with the :link pseudo-class, i.e., a:link, could I explain the difference? Or would I throw out a useless definition and then hear the fraud squad busting through my office windows from their black helicopters?

I couldn’t articulate the difference but can now. The venerable W3C states that browsers use :link and :visited to distinguish between links that have not or have been visited. Also, these pseudo-classes are mutually exclusive. So, what’s true for a:link will never be true for a:visited, and vice versa, but if you define a style for a, it will be true for both.

About pseudo-classes: a layman’s definition of a pseudo-class is hard to find, but 456 Berea Street has a blog entry on pseudo-classes that’s helpful.