a href link for entire div in HTML/CSS

Question

UPDATE 06/10/2014: using div's inside a's is semantically correct in HTML5.

You'll need to choose between the following scenarios:

<a href="http://google.com">
    <div>
        Hello world
    </div>
</a>

which is semantically incorrect, but it will work.

<div style="cursor: pointer;" onclick="window.location='http://google.com';">
    Hello world
</div>

which is semantically correct but it involves using JS.

<a href="http://google.com">
    <span style="display: block;">
        Hello world
    </span>
</a>

which is semantically correct and works as expected but is not a div any more.

Why don't you strip out the <div> element and replace it with an <a> instead? Just because the anchor tag isn't a div doesn't mean you can't style it with display:block, a height, width, background, border, etc. You can make it look like a div but still act like a link. Then you're not relying on invalid code or JavaScript that may not be enabled for some users.

Do it like this:

Parentdivimage should have specified width and height, and its position should be:

position: relative;

Just inside the parentdivimage, next to other divs that parent contains you should put:

<a href="linkt.to.smthn.com"><span class="clickable"></span></a>

Then in css file:

.clickable {
  height: 100%;
  width: 100%;
  left: 0;
  top: 0;
  position: absolute;     
  z-index: 1;
}

The span tag will fill out its parent block which is parentdiv, because of height and width set to 100%. Span will be on the top of all of surrounding elements because of setting z-index higher than other elements. Finally span will be clickable, because it's inside of an 'a' tag.

Two things you can do:

1. Change #childdivimage to a span element, and change #parentdivimage to an anchor tag. This may require you to add some more styling to get things looking perfect. This is preffered, since it uses semantic markup, and does not rely on javascript.

2. Use Javascript to bind a click event to #parentdivimage. You must redirect the browser window by modifying window.location inside this event. This is TheEasyWay^TM, but will not degrade gracefully.

Going off of what Surreal Dreams said, it's probably best to style the anchor tag in my experience, but it really does depend on what you are doing. Here's an example:

Html:

<div class="parent-div">
  <a href="#">Test</a>
  <a href="#">Test</a>
  <a href="#">Test</a>
</div>

Then the CSS:

.parent-div {
  width: 200px;
}
a {
  display:block;
  background-color: #ccc;
  color: #000;
  text-decoration:none;
  padding:10px;
  margin-bottom:1px;
}
a:hover {
  background-color: #ddd;
}

http://jsbin.com/zijijuduqo/1/edit?html,css,output

Make the div of id="childdivimag" a span instead, and wrap that in an a element. As the span and img are in-line elements by default this remains valid, whereas a div is a block level element, and therefore invalid mark-up when contained within an a.

put display:block on the anchor element. and/or zoom:1;

but you should just really do this.

a#parentdivimage{position:relative; width:184px; height:235px; 
                 border:2px solid #000; text-align:center; 
                 background-image:url("myimage.jpg"); 
                 background-position: 50% 50%; 
                 background-repeat:no-repeat; display:block; 
                 text-indent:-9999px}

<a id="parentdivimage">whatever your alt attribute was</a>