Set a:hover based on class

Question

I have the following HTML:

<div class="menu">
    <a class="main-nav-item" href="home">home</a>
    <a class="main-nav-item-current" href="business">business</a>
    <a class="main-nav-item" href="about-me">about me</a>
</div>

In CSS, I want to set the a:hover for these menu items to a particular color. So I write:

.menu a:hover
{
    color:#DDD;
}

But, I want to set this a:hover color only for those <a> tags with the class main-nav-item and not the main-nav-item-current, because it has a different color and shouldn't change on hover. All <a> tags within the menu div should change color on hover except the one with the current class.

How can I do it using CSS?

I tried something like

.menu a:hover .main-nav-item
{
    color:#DDD;
}

thinking that only ones with main-nav-item class will change color on hover, and not the current one. But it is not working.

Solution 1

Try this:

.menu a.main-nav-item:hover { }

In order to understand how this works it is important to read this the way the browser does. The a defines the element, the .main-nav-item qualifies the element to only those which have that class, and finally the psuedo-class :hover is applied to the qualified expression that comes before.

Basically it boils down to this:

Apply this hover rule to all anchor elements with the class main-nav-item that are a descendant child of any element with the class menu.

Solution 2

Cascading is biting you. Try this:

.menu > .main-nav-item:hover
    {
        color:#DDD;
    }

This code says to grab all the links that have a class of main-nav-item AND are children of the class menu, and apply the color #DDD when they are hovered.

Solution 3

Set a:hover based on class you can simply try:

a.main-nav-item:hover { }

Solution 4

how about .main-nav-item:hover

this keeps the specificity low

Solution 5

try this

.div
{
text-decoration:none;
font-size:16;
display:block;
padding:14px;
}

.div a:hover
{
background-color:#080808;
color:white;
}

lets say we have a anchor tag used in our code and class"div" is called in the main program. the a:hover will do the thing, it will give a vampire black color to the background and white color to the text when the mouse is moved over it that's what hover means.

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Comments

[Admin]

It worked! :) Can you explain how that CSS selector is interpreted by the browser? Like in words. So that I know the logic and it'll be helpful for other CSS I write...

[Joe Dargie]

In words, that selector would be: “all <a> tags with a class of main-nav-item, and an ancestor with a class of menu, that are in the hover state (i.e. have the mouse cursor on top of them)”.

[Admin]

Another way of doing it. Will check it out too. Thanks :)