css and self-closing anchor tags

I'm encountering an issue using css to format html that uses self-closing anchor tags

ie <A name="risk" />

Since there are several bookmark links at the top, these anchors are spread throughout the page. My styles for anchors are as follows:

a { font-weight: normal }

.body a { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px; font-weight: normal; color: 3878db; text-decoration:underline }

PROBLEM: The text following each <a name> tag is inheriting the anchor style. This is the case until an acutal </a> tag appears in the code.

Is there another solution besides changing the the self closing acnhor tag to a standard tag <a name="risk"> </a>

Thanks!

By adding the attribute selector [href] to the a in your style rules, the style will only be applied to those <a> elements for which an href attribute is defined...


Maybe this works for you?

This fix seems to work in Netscape -- but not in IE5 or IE6. It seems that IE is not recognizing anything about the .body a style when I add the [href] attribute to it. It looks like it ignores it and just delivers the default style.

Here is my style as it stands now:

.body a[href] { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px; font-weight: normal; color: 3878db; text-decoration:underline }

Thank you very much for your reply!

I have found that all this talk about closing tags with /> is bs... it never works for me
Just use the closing tag like you are supposed to do, and it will work fine. Why complicate things?