How do I highlight a link based on the current page?

Question

Sorry if this sounds like a really stupid question, but I need to make a link change colour when you are on the page it links to.

For example, when you are on the "Questions" page of StackOverflow, the link at the top changes colour. How do you do this?

Answer 1

It really depends on how your page is constructed. Typically, I would do this using CSS, and assign give the link an id called "active"...

<a id="active" href="thisPage.html">this page</a>

...and in the CSS...

a#active { color: yellow; }

Obviously this is a fairly simplistic example, but it illustrates the general idea.

Answer 2

It's a server-side thing -- when rendering the page, add a class like "current-page" to the link. Then you can style it separately from the other links.

For example, StackOverflow renders the links with class="youarehere" when it points to the page you're already on.