[thelist] Form Submittal on Enter

Andrew Clover and at doxdesk.com
Tue Jan 29 12:52:01 CST 2002


Jeff <jeff at members.evolt.org wrote:

> it doesn't actually say anywhere else in the passage that the "enter" key
> should *not* be used to submit forms that contain more than one
> single-line text input.

Fair enough I suppose. I personally actually don't mind the behaviour -
as you point out, Windows does it globally, and I'm used to it - it just
tends to trip less experienced users up quite often.

> i think the "standard" you're thinking of is netscape's interpretation of
> it at the time and nn2/nn3's behavior which was to not submit the form

Yes, although other browsers of the day behaved the same way. I saw that
passage in HTML2 as attempting to standardise this behaviour, although if
it was then it's clearly not worded strongly enough.

> the only weird thing i find with ie is that sometimes pressing "enter" to
> submit won't send the name/value pair of the default submit button

Yes, that's what I was talking about when I called it "strange".

> the default submit button (the first one to appear in the html source).

This is the main problem with IE's enter-to-submit for me personally. If
you're going to have a 'default' button chosen, it would be nice to be able
to choose which one it is. The 'first button in source order' is rarely the
best choice, since Submit buttons are often at the very bottom of the form.
It would have been far better simply to submit no name/value pair in this
case, and let the script decide what the default is. This would also have
matched the established behaviour of passing no pair when submitting a
single-text-field form with enter.

> (no, supposed anti-trust issues don't play into this issue even a
> millionth as much as you anti-ms crowd would look the rest of us to
> think so feck off.  ;p).

Oof! Touchy! :-)

--
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://and.doxdesk.com/



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