Do I miss something or is it impossible to theme the link anchor HTML element itself for a specified menu via theme functions? We can theme the <li> elements and the menu block elements with HOOK_menu_link_NAME_menu() and such easely, but I had no luck with targeting the nested anchors itself. All I found was a dead thread and open issue for theme_links(): https://drupal.org/node/588148 - a function I have also tried before to target anchor elements inside a given menu and its links with a debugging test message, but without luck.

https://drupal.org/node/588148 => theme_links() is not really themeable [#588148] => Drupal core, theme system, normal, needs work, 49 comments, 1 IRC mention

theme_links(): Returns HTML for a set of links. => theme_links($variables)

This is the function the issue is about I have posted above. As the issue shows off, it sadly doesn't work very well.

Can anyone point me to another workaround for it? Sorry for asking, but I am a little bit lost here on the half of the way in my scope, because I didn't expected that this could become a problem. I would like to add style class attributes to the element in ul > li of a given menu (not of all menus, thats what theme_links() does)...

And yes, I know the menu_attributes module. It's an awesome module I use very often. But here the limited scope of it all is to solve this directly by a theme function to implement a toggle setting for it later. So I look for a function. I was also looking into the module code of menu_attributes for inspiration but the only function I can imagine being interesting for my approach is hook_menu_link_alter(), but it also seems only to target