The link that only looked like a link

Last week I received a mass-mailed invitation for a conference on WiFi. I once shortly met the person who is organising this event, so mildly interested I started reading and came upon a link to the accompanying website. I clicked.

Nothing happened. I clicked again.

Nothing.

Then I noticed the mouse pointer didn’t change to the little hand while hovering over the link. This is what the source looked like:

I have no idea what the author of this email must have been thinking. Why use a font tag and an underline element to create something that looks just like a link, instead of simply creating a proper link using the anchor tag? This must be one of the worst cases of a webdesigner only paying attention to the visual result instead of creating proper semantic markup.

By the way, the author of the email is also the author of a dutch book titled ‘Web design in de praktijk’ (Practical web design). I am very curious about the chapter on links.