xml and css: cant get custom class to work on links

[roystik]

Hello. I've been working on this horizontal scrolling text project. I'm using a dynamic textfield, whose content is being pulled from an xml file.

Now I have been able to successfully format the xml file, except when it comes to custom classes and applying them to URLs i.e.

<a href="someurl.htm" target="_blank" class="down">name of link </a>

Here is the CSS I'm using:

a:link {font-weight:bold;	text-decoration: none;}

a:hover {color: #000000; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;}

a.down:link { color: #ffff00; font-weight:bold; text-decoration: none;}

a.down:hover { color: #660000; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;}

item {color: #000000; font-size: 11px; display: inline;}

And here's the XML:

<itc>
<item><a href="someurl.htm" target="_blank" class="down">name of link </a></font> (10 Aug)</item>

</itc>

And here's the code I used to load the XML and CSS into flash:

thisText.html = true;

myvariable=new Date().getTime();
myStyle = new TextField.StyleSheet();
myStyle.load("css/styles.css");
TextHolder.styleSheet = myStyle;
thisText = new XML();
thisText.load("content/itc.xml");
thisText.onLoad = function(success) {
	if (success) {
		TextHolder.text = thisText;
	}
};

I've tried everything I can think of, so any help you can give is greatly appreciated.