1)
You need to actually have the words between the <a> tags that you want to show up...the href element just tells the computer where you want to go.
e.g.
<a href="http://yadayada">Put Words Here</a>
Then your link will show up as
Put Words Here
2)
Sigil uses heading tags <h1, h2, h3 etc> to determine what to put in the TOC. You need to put a header at the beginning of the About the Author file.
e.g.
<h2>About the Author</h2>
or, if you don't want a header to be at the beginning, this will still show up in the TOC:
<h2 title="About the Author"></h2>
3)
Once you have heading tags on all the files you want in the TOC, just generate the TOC again and it will show up! It doesn't matter if it is an html or xhtml file - sigil plays well with both.
Also, IE is just a browser that can read html files (and not a very good one if you want my opinion
). HTML can be read by many browsers - IE, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.
Cheers,