CSS display block and floated elements (css mastery) Can this be done? - css

Question

So I'm developing a mobile micro site and that said, I want the links on the page, to behave
like ios links/tabs do, that when you click on them, the whole width of the button is active and changes color to display a click/finger over state etc..plus the WHOLE width of that div behaves like a button so that either on a small phone or a tablet, as long as I don't specify a width, that its active state goes from left to right ALL THE WAY as a "block"
To that effect for example, if I have a regular text link. like this:
<div class="mainBtns">Portfolio</div>
id give it this CSS so that on mouseover/click with finget etc, that it behaves like an ios button/tab.
CSS:
.mainBtns a{
display:block;
}
.mainBtns a:hover{
background-color:#d8d3cb;
}
Now that said. This is the problem im trying to solve.
I have a parent Div called thumbItemW (the content wrapper);
and two child items called galThumb and galThumbtxt
The content block looks like this:
<div class="thumbItemW ">
<div class="galThumb">
<a href="gallery-highrise.php" alt=""><img src="images/thumbs/highrise.jpeg" alt="High rise Gallery" />
</a>
</div> **//this is the gallery thumb floated left**
<div class="galThumbTxt">
HIGH RISE CONTEMPORARY
</div>**//this is the gallery thumb text floated right**
<div class="clearEm"> </div>//clear the float
</div> <!-- thumbItemW ender -->
What I want to do is that, when the user finger clicks the parent div, that the background color changes like in the example above with "mainBtns / mainBtns a:hover"
Problem is that, unlike the first example with mainBtns, since this one has child items, if I do something like:
pseudo CSS:
.thumbItemW a:hover{
display:block;
}
or something like this, this doesn't work the way id want it, since the elements are floats inside this parent div.
What I'm wanting to do is make the parent div .thumbItemW be like a display block so that when the user clicks, that they can click ANYwhere along that divs width and still activate the button as oppose to clicking RIGHT ontop of the button or text.
Can this be achieved the way I have it? Can this be achieved with CSS alone WITHOUT javascript/jquery?
Hope it's not too confusing.

Answer 1

why wouldn't you just specify width and height on the a element?