possibly. I may be confused by different versions and stuff but when you were using classes they were on span tags rather than the anchors weren't they? I figured that if you were putting classes on spans that you'd put inline style on spans. If you were going to put the styles on the anchors then I'm not sure why not put the classes on anchors too.

Best practice I think you are right though that the anchors should have the styles on them directly. This is fairly important if you are doing things like colours since the default of anchors being in a differnet colour will likely override you if you aren't careful when putting styles outside the anchors.

I guess the nasty regexs you were talking about were converting the spands with classes on into anchors with styles on? If so then just change both to have classes and styles on the anchors. Unless there is a reason I missed not to of course in which case don't.

I'm still desperately trying to be useful in the hopes that I can reclaim those thanks that I was denied! :)