[whatwg] Requests to change <button> to match IE7.
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Tue Oct 28 16:11:26 PDT 2008
On Sat, 14 Apr 2007, Simon Pieters wrote:
>
> For compatibility with IE, <button> should default to type=button
> instead of type=submit.
On Sat, 14 Apr 2007, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>
> <button> without type should default to button.
> <button type="unknown"> should default to submit.
>
> That way, we could still introduce new button types in the future and
> have them fall back to submit, while retaining compat with IE.
On Sat, 14 Apr 2007, Simon Pieters wrote:
>
> We currently don't have interop with IE and other browsers with regards
> to what to send to the server as the value of <button>.
>
> IE always sends .innerText as value.
>
> Other browsers always send the contents of value="" as value, or the
> empty string if it's missing (as per HTML4).
>
> There may be content on the Web relying on IE's behavior, e.g. missing
> value="" attribute. Still, the other browsers agree on using value=""
> and using value="" is useful (in order to send one value to the server
> but show different text to the user as button text), and is the way
> other form controls work.
>
> A middle ground could be to use value="" if the attribute is present, or
> .innerText otherwise (pretty much like <option>).
On Sat, 14 Apr 2007, Kornel Lesinski wrote:
>
> IIRC it's innerHTML, but I can't verify it at the moment.
>
> Is there really a noticable number of sites that rely on IE's broken
> behaviour? I doubt, because:
>
> * By sending contents of button instead of value, it doesn't provide
> much more functionality than <input type=submit>.
>
> * Styling of <button> is not an easy task, so it's unlikely to be used
> for its HTML contents - authors rather use <input type=image> or <a
> href="javascript:sendform()">
>
> * And worst of all - IE always sends all undisabled <buttons>. This
> makes value irrelevant, because you can't check which button was clicked
> anyway.
On Sat, 14 Apr 2007, Simon Pieters wrote:
>
> Apparently, enough for the IE team to not change it for IE7, despite me
> sending a bug report about it. (The bug was closed as "by design" IIRC.)
IE8b2, WebKit trunk, Firefox trunk, and Opera 9.6 are now all consistent
and do what the spec says:
http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/?%3C!DOCTYPE%20html%3E%0A...%3Cform%20action%3D%22..%2F..%2Fcgi%2Ftest-tools%2Fecho%22%3E%3Cbutton%20name%3Da%3Ex%3Cbr%3Ey%3C%2Fbutton%3E%3Cbutton%20name%3Db%20type%3Db%3Ex%3Cbr%3Ey%3C%2Fbutton%3E%3C%2Fform%3E
Thus, I have not changed the spec to match the above requests.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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