vertical text centering in <a> vs <button> - html

Question

I came across this behavior recently when a client reported that some of the buttons on a page had vertically centered text while others did not.
As it turns out, buttons will vertically center text inside them but links won't. Example here: http://jsfiddle.net/valentin/7EjtD/
a, button{
height: 200px;
background-color: #ff6400;
color: #fff;
font-weight: bold;
display: inline-block;
vertical-align: top;
border: 0;
padding: 20px;
font-family: sans-serif;
text-decoration: none;
}
Is there any way to add this behavior to links as well outside of using line-height?

Answer 1

Button aligns to the middle because is its default behavior. Your fiddle is aligning top actually. To make it work you can wrap your elements on an display:table element, like a div. Then set the button and the link to be display:table-cell. Then your vertical-align will work. Like this:
<div class="wrapper">
LINK
<button>BUTTON</button>
</div>
And the css:
*{
box-sizing: border-box;
}
div.wrapper {
display:table;
}
a, button{
height: 200px;
background-color: #ff6400;
color: #fff;
font-weight: bold;
display: table-cell;
vertical-align: middle;
border: 0;
padding: 20px;
font-family: sans-serif;
text-decoration: none;
}

Answer 2

Buttons are inline-block elements, while anchors are just inline. You can use padding to achieve the same effect:
a
{
padding: 91px 20px; /* <---(height-fontSize)/2 */
height: auto;
}
JSFiddle

Answer 3

TableData (TD AKA cell) are pretty damn good at default text centering ;)
live demo
a{
display: table-cell;
vertical-align: middle;
}
for clean-code-sake i'd use a special class like:
a.buttonAlike{

Answer 4

Sorry folks! Didn't see he wanted to avoid line-height. Original post:
Add line-height equal to the height of your element. In this case:
line-height: 200px;
DEMO: JSFIDDLE