BUTTON - Button

The BUTTON element defines a submit button, reset button, or push button. Authors can also use INPUT to specify these buttons, but the BUTTON element allows richer labels, including images and emphasis. However, BUTTON is new in HTML 4.0 and poorly supported among current browsers, so INPUT is a more reliable choice at this time.

The TYPE attribute of BUTTON specifies the kind of button and takes the value submit (the default), reset, or button. The NAME and VALUE attributes determine the name/value pair sent to the server when a submit button is pushed. These attributes allow authors to provide multiple submit buttons and have the form handler take a different action depending on the submit button used.

Some examples of BUTTON follow:

• <BUTTON NAME=submit VALUE=modify ACCESSKEY=M>Modify information</BUTTON>
<BUTTON NAME=submit VALUE=continue ACCESSKEY=C>Continue with application</BUTTON>
• <BUTTON ACCESSKEY=S>Submit <IMG SRC="checkmark.gif" ALT="&#10004;"></BUTTON>
<BUTTON TYPE=reset ACCESSKEY=R>Reset <IMG SRC="x.gif" ALT="&#10008;"></BUTTON>
• <BUTTON TYPE=button ID=toggler ONCLICK="toggle()" ACCESSKEY=H>Hide <strong>non-strict</strong> attributes</BUTTON>

The ACCESSKEY attribute, used throughout the preceding examples, specifies a single Unicode character as a shortcut key for pressing the button. Entities (e.g. é) may be used as the ACCESSKEY value.

The boolean DISABLED attribute makes the BUTTON element unavailable. The user is unable to push the button, the button cannot receive focus, and the button is skipped when navigating the document by tabbing.

The TABINDEX attribute specifies a number between 0 and 32767 to indicate the tabbing order of the button. A BUTTON element with TABINDEX=0 or no TABINDEX attribute will be visited after any elements with a positive TABINDEX. Among positive TABINDEX values, the lower number receives focus first. In the case of a tie, the element appearing first in the HTML document takes precedence.

The BUTTON element also takes a number of attributes to specify client-side scripting actions for various events. In addition to the core events common to most elements, BUTTON accepts the following event attributes:

• ONFOCUS, when the element receives focus;
• ONBLUR, when the element loses focus.

More Information

• BUTTON in W3C HTML 4.0 Recommendation

Copyright © 1998 by Liam Quinn. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).