Applying text-decoration on css generated content in IE

Question

It seems IE doesn't care for text-decoration: none; defined for a:before pseudo element (or pseudo class).

Here is a JS Fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/9N35f/
I'd expect the ">" to lose the underline. It does in FF, Chrome and Safari, but not in IE. Tested with IE10 and IE9.

The question:

Any workarounds that I could try to make the :before element lose the underline? Ideally in IE9+

Is there a bug report for this somewhere? Or is it actually by the standards?

Answer 1

I'm aware this is a rather elderly thread, but having just been up against this problem in IE 11, and unable to find much help, I decided to experiment. Aided by a significantly improved dev tools than in the earlier versions I managed to figure it out - for what I'm working on at any rate. Chances are it'll work for others as well, although you might need to tweak. YMMV.

The HTML:

<li><a href="#">Whatever</a></li>

The CSS (edited after @frnhr pointed out that the initial version I posted didn't actually work):

a {
    display: block;
    position: relative;
    padding-left: 15px;
    text-decoration: none;
}

a:hover {
    text-decoration: underline;
}

a:before {
    position: absolute;
    left: 0;
    top: 0;
    height: calc(100% - 2px);

    overflow: hidden;

    content: ">";
}

The secret sauce is setting the height and the overflow: hidden; line; it means that the underline is still there but outside the viewport provided by pseudo element, and so never gets seen on screen. It also works across other browsers (tested on Chrome and Firefox as well). Depending on your existing styling you'll probably want to tweak the pixel value in the calc() value.

See http://jsbin.com/biwomewebo/1/edit?html,css,output

Answer 2

IE seems to be in error here, since display: block in your code should remove the underlining. According to clause 16.3 Decoration in the CSS 2.1 spec, “User agents must not render these text decorations on content that is not text. For example, images and inline blocks must not be underlined.”

There does not seem to a bug a report on this at the IE Feedback Home.

In this case, a suitable workaround might be to use an image as the generated content:

a:before {
    content: url(arrow.png);
}

where arrow.png refers to a suitable small icon. The use of url(...) in content is described in CSS3 Generated and Replaced Content Module, which is a seriously outdated draft (the last version is from 2003), but this part has been widely implemented in browsers. Not in IE 7, however. So if you wish to cover IE 7 as well, consider the approach in @EugeneXA’s answer, possibly generating the extra markup dynamically with JavaScript.