Dialog - why does the close button use an <A> tag?

Dialog - why does the close button use an <A> tag?

In our application we've noticed that hovering over the 'x' close button dialog box causes the browser status to show '.../path/#' in the status bar, or in Chrome make that appear as a popup in the bottom left.

When adding extra buttons to the title bar I've used a <div> instead of <a href="#"> and then added this to our CSS to make sure we get the right cursor.

  1. *[role="button"] {
  2. cursor: pointer;
  3. cursor: hand;
  4. }
Is there any particular reason (accessibility?) why the current code uses that <A> tag?