On Tue, February 24, 2009 1:54 am, John Horner wrote: > Advantages of using buttons: > > 1) Button elements don't need styling, they take their styling from the > user's operating system, which they are, I assume, familiar and > comfortable with. I won't be reinventing the wheel. >
Actually, the specific purpose of the button is to allow one to have buttons that *don't* look like ordinary buttons: "Buttons created with the BUTTON element function just like buttons created with the INPUT element, but they offer richer rendering possibilities: the BUTTON element may have content. " <http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#edef-BUTTON> In other words, the purpose of the button element is to allow the functionality of a button without imposing the appearance of one. > 2) Anchor elements don't have a built-in "disabled" mode, buttons do, > and again the styling comes directly from the OS and the user is > familiar with it. > If it doesn't do anything (that is, it is "disabled"), then it shouldn't be an anchor element. An anchor element used as a hyperlink has a semantic meaning. If that meaning should not be attached to a piece of content - e.g. the words "Next page" when there is no next page - then the link should be absent. While there may be good usability reasons for retaining the content, such as maintaining consistency of interface, to think in terms of providing functionality and then disabling it is to put the cart before the horse: instead, only provide the functionality when it is functional. Regards, Nick. -- Nick Fitzsimons http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/ ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
