CSS Layout appearing differently depending upon hosting server

Please note that the pages served from the remote servers work on Chrome appear very similar to that from the localhost, but when viewed on IE the locally served pages appear to be different that served from remote server.

If this might give you some clue on the issue.

I checked and found that the probable problem is as described below.

I have indicated the style for a.link and a.visited in the starting of the css file as

a:link { color:#009900; text-decoration: underline;}    
 a:visited { color: #4E5869; text-decoration: underline;}    

Later in the css file, I have defined styles for cbt, cbt a, cbt a:link and cbt a:visited separately. where anchor link a is nested inside cbt tag like

<cbt><a href="abc.com">some text</a></cbt>

the styles for cbt etc is as below:

 cbt { display:block;
  float:none; 
 position: relative; 
 margin:5px 2px; 
 padding-left:1px; 
 padding-right:1px; 
 padding-top:5px; 
 padding-bottom:5px; 
 z-index:4; 
 clear:both; } 

 
 cbt a, cbt a:link { 
 font-size: 1em; 
 text-decoration:none; 
 text-align:justify; 
 text-justify:inter-word; 
 font-weight:normal; 
 word-wrap:break-word; 
 color:#00C; 
 display:block; } 
 
 cbt a:visited { color:#CC0033; } 

Inspite of the above codes, the anchor link a inside cbt tag is not taking the styles defined with cbt a, cbt a:link, but is instead taking styles defined in a:link initially.

Why is it so?

Hence they are behaving as inline elements in IE9 when hosted on remote server by taking the initial style defined.

However,when the same page are viewed on localhost in IE9, the links behave as block elements (taking the later defined styles). The links also behave as block elements inside Chrome browser when viewed on localhost as well as on remote server. In this situation the links are taking the styles defined later in the css file.

Please advise on why the css behaviour is so erratic.