Let’s create a pure CSS effect that changes the color of a text link on hover – but slide that new color in instead of simply swapping colors.
Katherines post explores four different techniques to achieve the effect, and their comparative pros and cons with regard to accessibility, performance, and browser support.
Technique 4, which uses a CSS transform seems to be the most flexible, best-performing and has best cross-browser support, however because it requires adding a semantically redundant <span> into the anchor I would use it sparingly rather than on all links by default.