No, I don't want to set a link colour!

CSS is ruining my day again!
(What monkey came up with all this? This whole web thing is way too hard-coded).

This time it's partly CSS's fault and partly the fault of those bloody web browsers (Except Links, which continues to be my favourite). What's happening is I have a big CSS file with lots of styles, and with a whole bunch of those I don't want their links to change colour based on whether they are active, visited, etc. I just want them to stay how they were to begin with because these links are titles and it is bad form to have purply titles!

This gets weird because I feel it is ugly, wasteful and stupid to list through a.someclass, a:visited.someclass, a:active.someclass (etc.) for every single class. (For which I must reset the colour, text decorations, etc. to mimic that of the original definition, which is just ridiculous!)

This is also bad because there's no telling what style a web browser is going to change. I can run under the assumption that all it does is change the font colour, but there's no telling when some moron will come along and build a market-dominating web browser that turns visited links to size 45, thus destroying my layout.

Is there a way to tell the web browser to just not change the style of my links?
For example, can I kill the Visited link class in particular places?


Edit:

Actually, I just had an epiphany: I don't care that IE looks awful, the end.
Ignoring the destroyed spacing stuff, do the links here look like a mess in your IE, or is it just mine?
http://test.deltahumanesociety.org
One weird thing I'm observing is IE being very reluctant to display the "this is a link!" mouse pointer when hovering over items in the sidebar now that I've been playing with styles for the Anchor tag.

I bet you your one of those people who get really annoyed when I set my web browser to "text size Largest", and tells me that its my fault that all the text is in the wrong place.

I understand your problem.... but hahahah I like it when links change colour to show that Ive been somewhere. OK maybe some people dont, but I do. And Im glad its hard to change, cos that means most people wont change it. And I like it like that.

Anyway, me likeing it or not, it seems bad design that you cannot just set some flag or other to stop them changeing colour.

um......

a:link		{ color: #681607 }
a:link		{ text-decoration: none }

a:visited	{ color: #B64B28 }
a:visited	{ text-decoration: none }

a:active	{ color: #FFE0C5 }
a:active	{ text-decoration: none }

a:hover		{ color: #FFE0C5 }
a:hover		{ text-decoration: none }

Then just don't address the links in any other classes.. Or if you want to change the color.. change all the consistant things locally and all the inconsistant things in the class... such as color... or whatever.

EDIT.

My point was to just say. Make changes globally for all links.. then the things that aren't the same in each class should just have what is different.

EDIT 2.

Had a look at the site. I see what you mean... Still. Figger out what link style is most common and make the global that. Then do the other link styles in the classes.. That is your best bet...

I would re-think the design if CSS is a pain.. that normally means you are using too many fonts, colors and styles.. things stop reading as links... Took me a few moments to see the nav at the top. White, no underline like the blue links... just didn't seem like links. Links should change when you hover over them at least. Some kind of change. That way you know they 'do' something.. otherwise you run the risk of confusing people who don't know the web well... which is true of the target user of this site.

They seem to be OK here. In my IE (6) the links look better than in my FireFox (1.5). In IE the font used for the links at the top of the page (in the header) is a sans serif one as used for the other titles on the page, while in FireFox it isn't.

You can separate selectors with commas, once this is done all links will inherit this style until you override it.

a, a:link, a:visited { color: #681607;
text-decoration: none;
text-decoration: none }

a:active,
a:hover { color: #FFE0C5;
text-decoration: none }

Incidentally, no matter how hard you try, someone will always view your site differently from the way you want them to. This is deliberate, since the user should always have final choice.