Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Pseudoselectors

Style rules are normally attached to elements in the document tree structure, such as those we’ve discussed in the chapter so far. But some elements are not necessarily found in the document markup, such as which links have been visited or the first line of a paragraph. To apply style to these instances in a document, CSS provides several pseudoselectors . Instead of targeting a particular element in the document, pseudoselectors are interpreted by the browser based on context and function. Pseudoselectors are indicated by the colon (:) character. Pseudoselectors are divided into pseudoclasses and pseudoelements.