Ben’s Techy Musings

Recently I wrote about using an image as a form submit button. Essentially I described some basic CSS which most browsers will accept to style an <input type="submit" ... /> as an alternative to using <input type="image" ... />.

What I wrote is anything but groundbreaking and is widely used. And I’ve just found an even better way to do it, by using a button element instead of an input.

What prompted me to look for something better was noticing that Camino, the native OS X Gecko browser, lacks the depth of CSS support for input elements that the more popular browsers, namely Firefox, IE and Safari, have. This means that the many sites which use the technique I described in that post can be unusable in Camino, as form submit buttons appear grey and empty.

But apparently (and I did not realise this until today), using <button type="submit">Submit</button> is a valid and functional replacement for a form input element. And a button is more flexible, allowing you to put an image inside it instead of text, for example. Best of all, though, a button accepts styles more readily in most browsers.

I fixed my form submit button in Camino by changing it to a button and applying exactly the same styles that I had applied to my input. Rather than link you to the post again, here’s the code with the “input” prefix to the class name, just to help you avoid making the same mistake I made.

.customSubmit {
 width : 76px;
 height : 36px;
 overflow : hidden;
 padding : 36px 0 0 0;
 background : url('/images/custom_submit.png') no-repeat;
 border : 0;
}

And the button code, for good measure:

<button type="submit" class="customSubmit">Submit</button>

Again, this probably isn’t groundbreaking stuff but many sites could do with using this alternative to increase their browser support.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Techy Musings.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.