David said:
But doing that doesn't result in the output I want in either IE or FF.
You haven't told us anything about your style sheet. You apparently have some
style sheet since otherwise you would have written thusly:
It outputs the 'Welcome' in small letters, compared to the big letters of
regular h2 format.
Naturally, styling depends on markup.
The code I posted displays as I want, it just gives a
warning, though, and I thought I'd try to resolve that.
It is not a warning. What you get from Tidy is the same you would get from a
validator: a report about a syntax error, meaning that your document does not
comply with HTML specifications, and isn't strictly speaking an HTML document
at all; hence there is no specification on what a browser should do with it.
(You can try it yourself and see the difference I'm talking about.)
Why don't you tell the URL to help people who might help you for free?
Maybe the only way to resolve it is to create a new link class with the
characteristics of the h2 class, but that is disappointing, to say the
least. I was hoping for something a little more elegant to give a link
the characteristics of another class, except underlined and such. But
maybe the 'underlined and such' makes it so a new link class is the only
way. Is it only (mis)fortunate that my hack works?
It sounds that you are thoroughly confused. There is no "h2 class", to begin
with.
Is "Welcome" a second-level heading on the page? If not, simply don't use h2
markup for it. If you style it, do _not_ try to make it appear in the style
you expect browsers to use for second-level headings, because that would
confuse users. Start from something simple like
<div class="greeting"><a href="...">Welcome</a></div>
though it's highly questionable whether a greeting should be a link (and
whether you should waste space and user's time with "Welcome" texts, which
are a common signal of naive design and lack of useful content - on the Web,
courtesy means getting to the point without babbling).