This is usually caused by lazy devs who use

    <div class="mybutton"><a href="javascript:dosomefoo();">foo</a></div>

instead of

    <div class="mybutton" onclick="dosomefoo();" style="cursor:pointer;">foo</div>

It's also possible they were trying to support old versions of MSIE in the former.

The latter is not WCAG compliant.

Really the <a> tag should wrap the div, not the other way around.

The original comment describes this issue with buttons, where presumably clicking the non-text portion of a button is a feature, not a bug.

To add on, clickable whitespace is more of a feature than a bug generally now, because at least in mobile-web world the worst possible thing you could do is make your touch target extremely small by making it only the icon rather than a standard touch target size centered on said icon.

Please don’t do the latter. It breaks keyboard accessibility. Users that don’t have a mouse have no way of clicking this fake button.

This MDN article[1] will help you find the correct attributes and behaviors to make your <div> fully accessible with a button role.

1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

It's luckily a very easy fix, just change the div tag for a button tag. You get all the a11y "for free."

> if you do the intuitive thing you always break it for one user or the other

No, if you do the intuitive thing you get:

  <a href="http://whereever/">foo</a>

which works fine for every user.

And if for some reason you still really really want it to look more like a button, there's no need for a wrapper div. For example:

  a {
      display: inline-block;
      padding: 4px;
      background: lightgray;
      border: 2px outset lightgray;
      text-decoration: none;
  }
  a:active {
      border: 2px inset lightgray;
  }

If you want to have the entire div act as a link, the link should cover the div, not the other way around. What’s not intuitive about that?

Intuitiveness is in the eye of the beholder. I'd argue that if you're experienced with accessibility, doing things the "accessible way" becomes more intuitive.