andy206uk — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 18:59:25 +0000

Good question! The way I would decide is whether it's the link that's important or the text. If the link is important then use option one, otherwise use the second one.

Abhishek Reddy — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 17:30:51 +0000

Though it shouldn't matter, I'd go with the first option because its DOM tree structure makes more sense to me. For example, if you had "a list of links", you might expect the first child node of every list item to be an anchor. But if it was wrapped in emphasis tags, then you'd get an em node instead.

As well, you can view the emphasis markup as being applied to the text (a DOM Text node), rather than the link itself. That is, the text would be emphasised whether it was a hyperlink or not. And if you did mean for the link to be emphasised, you'd use CSS anyway.