When will an <a> tag not inherit color attribute of parent tag?

Just an addendum to the other responses, if you want your <a> tags to inherit the colour from their parent you can use

a {color: inherit; }

By default an anchor tag does not inherit attributes like color if an href attribute is present.

Check out the difference between these two on a page:

<span style=color:green><a href="t">test</a></span>
<span style=color:green><a>test</a></span>

The following link is to the w3 c:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.2

User agents generally render links in such a way as to make them obvious to users (underlining, reverse video, etc.). The exact rendering depends on the user agent. Rendering may vary according to whether the user has already visited the link or not.

.....

Usually, the contents of A are not rendered in any special way when A defines an anchor only.