a href link for entire div in HTML/CSS

Here is what I am trying to accomplish in HTML/CSS:

I have images in different heights and widths, but they are all under 180x235. So what I want to do is create a div with border and vertical-align: middle them all. I have successfully done that but now I am stuck on how to properly a href link the entire div.

Here is my code:

<div id="parentdivimage" style="position:relative;width:184px;height:235px;border-width:2px;border-color:black;border-style:solid;text-align:center;">
    <div id="childdivimage" style="position:absolute;top:50%;height:62px;margin-top:-31px;">
        <img src="myimage.jpg" height="62" width="180">
    </div>
</div>

Please note that for the sake of copy pasting here easily, the style code is inline.

I read somewhere that I can simply add another parent div on top of the code and then do a href inside that. However, based on some research it won't be valid code.

So to sum it up again, I need the entire div (#parentdivimage) to be a href link.

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.