This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Tantek complains about how much code my CSS3 rules for styling local and external hyperlinks differently take:

There is also something to be said for simplicity. If you go read Stuart's article, you'll notice how many CSS3 rules it takes to emulate "a.local".

That's a little unfair. It actually takes two rules: one to style all links with http, and one to style absolute links that are to this domain (which could be local links). If you don't use absolute links inside a domain, then it's only one rule. The reason that my code listed six rules were that I do sometimes use absolute links in the domain, I also wanted a different effect on link hover, and I wanted to style one particular external link differently (which most people would not want to do). Moreover, a fair few of those rules could be combined together by putting multiple selectors in and separating them with commas. Personally, I think that explicitly tagging local links as "local" is bad, because it leaves open the possibility that a local link might not be classed, or that an external link might be erroneously classed. Browsers don't support the CSS3 selectors yet, but that's not the fault of the technique. -----