User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11 According to the XML spec, <tag/> and <tag></tag> are supposed to be equivalent representations of a tag with empty content. However, as the attached test case demonstrates, a named anchor represented as <a name="foo"/> will cause the anchor hover style to be applied to the paragraph that contains it, while the supposedly equivalent <a name="foo"></a> does not. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Load the attached test case, which has a red color hover style for anchors 2. Hover over the link, the first paragraph, and then the second Actual Results: The link and the second paragraph (the one with <a name="two"/>) turn red when you hover. Expected Results: Only the link should turn red. That is, <a name="foo"></a> produces the correct behavior, and <a name="foo"/> should be equivalent to it. Interestingly, Opera produces the same behavior. (IE does not.) Are you using some common code, perhaps?

Self-closing XML tags don't work in text/html. Use an XML mime type if you want XML parsing. If you use something other than :hover to test, I think you'll find that IE's text/html parser has the same behavior.