Removing underline from anchor tag

[murphydog77]

Hi. I'm a newbie to the CSS world, so please bear with me. I used FrontPage for years and decided to redo my web site with a free template I found online that uses CSS in combination with XHTML.

I'd say a good 75% of my pages have anchor tags(?) on them (FrontPage calls them bookmarks). The template I'm using underlines them like links, even though they aren't. How can I use CSS to remove the underline without removing the underlines from the real links on the pages?

Ex. of the code I'm talking about:

<a name="rear-facing">rear-facing</a>

If I set the text decoration for all a elements to none, that removes the underline for all links, including my <a name="">, correct? I don't want that to happen.

I also did a search and saw a post from a couple of years ago that said the <a name> tag is out-of-date.

Is there a way to deal with this in CSS or do I need to deal with it item by item in the HTML coding?

[Old_Honky]

I would make "name" a class.

CSS

a.name,
a:hover.name,
a:focus.name,
a:active.name 
{
text-decoration: none;
}

I put in the hover, focus and active declarations in case some other part of your CSS later in the cascade overrides a.name.

Then in the HTML use ID where you would have used "name" and add the class "name" to each anchor.

HTML

<a class="name" id="rear-facing">rear-facing</a>

[edited by: Old_Honky at 8:19 am (utc) on Oct. 22, 2007]

[rocknbil]

Welcome aboard murphydog77, it's not that name is outdated, it's deprecated as a handle for identifying the object in the document. Names are still very important for form objects, this is the key of the data value being sent to the server.

Both "bookmarks" and links are anchors: <a...> which is why it's styling it as a default hyperlink.

Another way around this is to not put the anchor directly on the text. Then you don't have to worry about styling. You can style the element with something semantic, such as a list item or heading.

<a name="rear-facing" id="rear-facing"></a>
rear-facing

[murphydog77]

Thank you both! I couldn't get it to work by making name a class, so I'll just not put the anchor directly on the text (that's a V-8 slap to the head).

What a great forum!

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, murphydog77!