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.

Answer 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.

Answer 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.

Answer 3

One common error is leaving a space before the class names. Even if this was the correct syntax:

.menu a:hover .main-nav-item

it never would have worked.

Therefore, you would not write

.menu a .main-nav-item:hover

it would be

.menu a.main-nav-item:hover