I'm trying to learn the best way to create buttons via HTML/CSS.
I was using clickable div's before, but looks like this was not the best idea ever.
What about button's? Or a href's
Which way is the best to go with today (html5 css3)?
It depends on the behavior you are looking for. If its purpose is to link to another page then use an <a>. If it is for submitting a form or doing some sort of post or get I would use a button.
There is a web based project management product called Basecamp. When they first launched they were using <a> tags as delete buttons next to each individual task. Users who visited their internal pages while using the google web optimizer plugin for chrome were seeing all of their tasks marked as deleted. Google page optimizer looks for links in the page and triggers a click to pre-load future pages.
Let form follow function and you should be good to go :0)
One reason to favor buttons is that buttons are naturally better for accessibility, while using links, spans or other tags fails on that count. To get proper accessibility with those other elements, you have to use ARIA roles to fix them.
That's not a hack per se, since that's part of what ARIA roles are for. But it's an extra thing to learn about and make sure that you get right.
the best way to create buttons in html is to use
or
because when you buttons and inputs of type submit are used by default by the browser when you try to submit a form
for example :
<form action="somepage.php" method="POST">
<input type="text" name="name1">
<textarea></textarea>
<input type="submit" value="submit the form with a input of type submit">
</form>
only when the user click the submit button the form data are submited
BUT , when we use a or divs to play the role of buttons you need to call javascript and ask for help
FINNALY THE GOOD PRACTICE IS TO USE BUTTONS AND INPUT OF TYPE SUBMIT TO PLAY THE ROLE OF BUTTON EVERYTHING ELSE IS A CUSTOMIZATION THAT CAN INCREASE THE TIME TO LOAD THE PAGE
Chrome is automatically adding a calendar widget for any fields that are <input type="date"> and also adds some strage date formatting to the field as well. Since the original html spec called for any input type that's not one of checkbox,radio,text,password,file etc being rendered as a normal text field this was how we were triggering our calendar widget. Is there a meta tag or some other option we can set to prevent chrome from doing this?
Screenshot (please note that this is not our code, chrome is automatically adding this):
The only way to prevent the native datepicker is not to give the input a type="date" attribute; simply use a straight type="text" input. There are some major advantages of using type="date" most notably optimized input capabilities for mobile devices. But to avoid the picker from displaying you'll have to forego those.
I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using <input type="date"> on my blog - http://tjvantoll.com/2012/06/30/creating-a-native-html5-datepicker-with-a-fallback-to-jquery-ui/.
I have this code <input type="text" value="destroy" AUTOCOMPLETE="on" /> to enable autocomplete, but it is not working.
Can u tell me any suggestions?
Auto complete is browser based and should be turned on by default. But usually they only store values that were submitted.
BTW here's an old SO post about autocomplete (just for fun)
Depends what you are trying to achieve. The autocomplete you used serves to offer user a choice from what the user himself typed before.
If you want autocomplete such like search engines have, where user is suggested a number of choices he never typed, then you need to use javascript, and also store somewhere data with autocomplete suggestions.
Here's an example:
http://www.pengoworks.com/workshop/jquery/autocomplete.htm
AUTOCOMPLETE="on"
This property is only used by Microsoft Internet Explorer and the default is on. You should only use it to turn it off. If the user turns it off in their browser you can't use it.
When using the xhtml1-transitional.dtd doctype, collecting a credit card number with the following HTML
<input type="text" id="cardNumber" name="cardNumber" autocomplete='off'/>
will flag a warning on the W3C validator:
there is no attribute "autocomplete".
Is there a standards-compliant way to disable browser auto-complete on sensitive fields in a form?
Here is a good article from the MDC which explains the problems (and solutions) to form autocompletion.
Microsoft has published something similar here, as well.
To be honest, if this is something important to your users, 'breaking' standards in this way seems appropriate. For example, Amazon uses the 'autocomplete' attribute quite a bit, and it seems to work well.
If you want to remove the warning entirely, you can use JavaScript to apply the attribute to browsers that support it (IE and Firefox are the important browsers) using someForm.setAttribute( "autocomplete", "off" ); someFormElm.setAttribute( "autocomplete", "off" );
Finally, if your site is using HTTPS, IE automatically turns off autocompletion (as do some other browsers, as far as I know).
Update
As this answer still gets quite a few upvotes, I just wanted to point out that in HTML5, you can use the 'autocomplete' attribute on your form element. See the documentation on W3C for it.
I would be very surprised if W3C would have proposed a way that would work with (X)HTML4. The autocomplete feature is entirely browser-based, and was introduced during the last years (well after the HTML4 standard was written).
Wouldn't be surprised if HTML5 would have one, though.
Edit: As I thought, HTML5 does have that feature. To define your page as HTML5, use the following doctype (i.e: put this as the very first text in your source code). Note that not all browsers support this standard, as it's still in draft-form.
<!DOCTYPE html>
HTML 4: No
HTML 5: Yes
The autocomplete attribute is an enumerated attribute. The attribute
has two states. The on keyword maps to the on state, and the off
keyword maps to the off state. The attribute may also be omitted. The
missing value default is the on state. The off state indicates that by
default, form controls in the form will have their autofill field name
set to off; the on state indicates that by default, form controls in
the form will have their autofill field name set to "on".
Reference: W3
No, but browser auto-complete is often triggered by the field having the same name attribute as fields that were previously filled out. If you could rig up a clever way to have a randomized field name, autocomplete wouldn't be able to pull any previously entered values for the field.
If you were to give an input field a name like "email_<?= randomNumber() ?>", and then have the script that receives this data loop through the POST or GET variables looking for something matching the pattern "email_[some number]", you could pull this off, and this would have (practically) guaranteed success, regardless of browser.
No, a good article is here in Mozila Wiki.
I would continue to use the invalid attribute. I think this is where pragmatism should win over validating.
How about setting it with JavaScript?
var e = document.getElementById('cardNumber');
e.autocomplete = 'off'; // Maybe should be false
It's not perfect, but your HTML will be valid.
I suggest catching all 4 types of input:
$('form,input,select,textarea').attr("autocomplete", "off");
Reference:
http://www.w3.org/Submission/web-forms2/#the-autocomplete
http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/input.html
If you use jQuery, you can do something like that :
$(document).ready(function(){$("input.autocompleteOff").attr("autocomplete","off");});
and use the autocompleteOff class where you want :
<input type="text" name="fieldName" id="fieldId" class="firstCSSClass otherCSSClass autocompleteOff" />
If you want ALL your input to be autocomplete=off, you can simply use that :
$(document).ready(function(){$("input").attr("autocomplete","off");});
Another way - which will also help with security is to call the input box something different every time you display it: just like a captha. That way, the session can read the one-time only input and Auto-Complete has nothing to go on.
Just a point regarding rmeador's question of whether you should be interfering with the browser experience: We develop Contact Management & CRM systems, and when you are typing other people's data into a form you don't want it constantly suggesting your own details.
This works for our needs, but then we have the luxury of telling users to get a decent browser:)
autocomplete='off'
autocomplete="off" this should fix the issue for all modern browsers.
<form name="form1" id="form1" method="post" autocomplete="off"
action="http://www.example.com/form.cgi">
[...]
</form>
In current versions of Gecko browsers, the autocomplete attribute works perfectly. For earlier versions, going back to Netscape 6.2, it worked with the exception for forms with "Address" and "Name"
Update
In some cases, the browser will keep suggesting autocompletion values even if the autocomplete attribute is set to off. This unexpected behavior can be quite puzzling for developers. The trick to really forcing the no-autocompletion is to assign a random string to the attribute, for example:
autocomplete="nope"
Since this random value is not a valid one, the browser will give up.
Documetation
Using a random 'name' attribute works for me.
I reset the name attribute when sending the form so you can still access it by name when the form is sent. (using the id attribute to store the name)
Note that there's some confusion about location of the autocomplete attribute. It can be applied either to the whole FORM tag or to individual INPUT tags, and this wasn't really standardized before HTML5 (that explicitly allows both locations). Older docs most notably this Mozilla article only mentions FORM tag. At the same time some security scanners will only look for autocomplete in INPUT tag and complain if it's missing (even if it is in the parent FORM). A more detailed analysis of this mess is posted here: Confusion over AUTOCOMPLETE=OFF attributes in HTML forms.
Not ideal, but you could change the id and name of the textbox each time you render it - you'd have to track it server side too so you could get the data out.
Not sure if this will work or not, was just a thought.
I think there's a simpler way.
Create a hidden input with a random name (via javascript) and set the username to that. Repeat with the password. This way your backend script knows exactly what the appropriate field name is, while keeping autocomplete in the dark.
I'm probably wrong, but it's just an idea.
if (document.getElementsByTagName) {
var inputElements = document.getElementsByTagName("input");
for (i=0; inputElements[i]; i++) {
if (inputElements[i].className && (inputElements[i].className.indexOf("disableAutoComplete") != -1)) {
inputElements[i].setAttribute("autocomplete","off");
}
}
}
I MADE THIS WORK IN 2020!
I basically create a css class that applies -webkit-text-security to my inputs.
Here's the link to a more recent discussion:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/64471795/8754782
This solution works with me:
$('form,input,select,textarea').attr("autocomplete", "nope");
if you want use autofill in this region: add autocomplete="false" in element
ex:
<input id="search" name="search" type="text" placeholder="Name or Code" autcomplete="false">
Valid autocomplete off
<script type="text/javascript">
/* <![CDATA[ */
document.write('<input type="text" id="cardNumber" name="cardNumber" autocom'+'plete="off"/>');
/* ]]> */
</script>