I've been using off-line validating with HTML-Kit. I get the warning "<a> isn't allowed in <table> elements". I get that with HTML 4.01 transitional and also with HTML 4.01 strict.

I have found no indication elsewhere that such <a>s are not allowed or are deprecated, and they work perfectly well in IE6 & IE7. Can someone throw light on whether that validation warning is warranted or not?

The only things that can go inside a TABLE directly are CAPTION, COL and COLGROUP, THEAD, TFOOT, TBODY, and TR.

The A element must go inside a TD or TH element, which goes inside a TR element (or possibly the CAPTION element).

Simlar query, have placed <a> into <tr>&<td>, however this has severly altered the appearance of the table i.e cells have stretched accross the page.

This is what i have in place at the moment

<tr>
<td>About Us<a href="C:\html\Aboutus.html"></a></td>
</tr>

Anyone any idea's of how to prevent this?

I think you mean <a href="C:\html\Aboutus.html"><About Us/a></a>.

Must be something else. Can you post a link to the page?

Syntactically <a href="C:\html\Aboutus.html">About Us</a> would be correct. Other than that as Darin mentioned you can't place a link directly under a <table> tag, you must follow the correct markup hierarchy.

If you could give us the link to the page I'm sure we can help you with sorting this out.

Thanks, Darin, that explains it.

However, at http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/special/a.html we read that the A element can go in "Block-level elements", which include TABLEs. So I'm just wondering whether that entry on the Reference page could be made clearer. I was using only <A NAME=...>s, which I had thought might have been innocuous, but they are not.