- From: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:46:08 -0500
- To: Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com>
- Cc: Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, Lars Gunther <gunther@keryx.se>, HTMLWG WG <public-html@w3.org>, W3C WAI-XTECH <wai-xtech@w3.org>
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 8:11 AM, Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com> wrote: > You have a very good point. Some very popular JS libraries do turn > links into buttons. Many CSS tutorials tout this as an example of good > CSS usage. > > If you go out and search on Google for "CSS link button" you get many > tutorials, examples, etc, that focus on styling links as buttons. If > you search on "JavaScript link button" you get many libraries that > support this functionality. > > Frankly, I doubt that the HTML WG has enough clout to "evangelize" a > change in this regard. Most people don't even know this is supposed to > be "bad". Links and buttons: click, and something happens. JS > developers don't tend to let a little thing like semantics get in the > way. Some of the bigger libraries _might_ change their ways, but there > is significant use of link as button in the wild -- we're in effect, > telling people to "break" their web pages in order for them to be > proper. We're also going counter to the many, many existing libraries, > tutorials, etc that say, in effect, this is OK. > > If we're paving cow paths, and working to ensure accessibility, it > seems to me that support for this very common usage should be taken > into consideration. Perhaps something in the specification to the > effect that such use is discouraged, but is not invalid. Sometimes making a link into a button seems to be the correct choice. If I want the styling of a button, but I want clicking it to just navigate you to another page, I can restyle an <a> to look like a button, or I can insert a <form action><button type=submit></></> and style the form away. The latter feels like a dirty hack. (I've used it, once, but only at the very very beginning of my webdev career when I didn't fully understand how urls and query params interacted.) Of course, if I'm just putting in some UI to hook a click handler onto, then <button> wins out again. I still use <a> sometimes, though. ~TJ
Received on Wednesday, 21 October 2009 13:47:00 UTC