This is plain text. Notice because the <body> tag is defined to have a color of brown, all items that inherit properties from the <body> tag will apply those attributes.
But by using an inline style we can override a style applied to an ancestor tag. Note this doesn't work in Netscape 4.x because CSS's are applied unevenly.
This link points to Yahoo so it turns green based on its contextual selector. But this link points to NVCC so the link color is the default color.