>The murky world of specificity. I think it's down to the fact that they both have equal value and 'last one wins' .......

There is a proper way to do it. It is highly confusing. Sometimes, I have to go back to an old stylesheet to take a look at how I did it. But, this one, the ordering of the hover style is quite weird. I suspect it is related to the cascading. Otherwise, if I would have created a A style which I could have used directly in the A HREF inside the cell, that would have worked. But, because I try to apply all the styles at the table level, it is quite weird at how the cascading works.