Use a:visited to select a hyperlink when it has been visited
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title></title> <style type="text/css"> a:visited { color: gray; background-color: white; } </style> </head> <body> <p> <a href="http://www.java2s.com">a:visited -- visited link</a> </p> </body> </html>