Sending Form data to the server can be achieved in several ways, all of them with their pros and cons. It is especially tricky to create a form that has to be accessible, look great and allow for internationalisation (i18n). This post discusses the different options and offers a JavaScript that works around most issues.

The most accessible and least pretty way to submit a form is via a submit button.

Pros:

• they resize with the font settings
• their text content is determined by the value attribute, therefore it is is easy to localise them

Contras:

• You cannot style them consistently across browsers, and they cannot get rollover states ¹

The other option is to use an input element with the type “image”, which enables you to use any image to submit the form

Pros:

• You have total control over the look and feel

Contras:

• Whilst applying a proper alternative text makes the images accessible to blind visitors, images don’t scale when the font size gets changed, which means they are not 100% accessible.
• i18n can become a maintenance issue, as you need to create (or automatically generate via the backend) images for each language.

Together with JavaScript, text links can be used to submit a form.

Pros:

• You have total control over the look and feel
• Text links scale with the font settings
• i18n is dead easy, as it is text content of the page, not even alternative text in attributes

Contras:

• requires JavaScript to work

Putting them all together

If you use a small JavaScript to check the document for submit buttons and dynamically replacing them with text links, you’ll get the best of both worlds:

• users without JavaScript will get normal submit buttons
• users with JavaScript styled text links.

See the demonstration page and try it alternately with JavaScript on and off.

The script that replaces the submit buttons uses Unobtrusive JavaScript and allows you to define a special class to add to each of the replacement links. The links will also have the same ID as the original submit button and their value as text content.

Feel free to use it and report any issues/problems here.²

¹ It is debateable if you should design your own form controls anyways, after all the users knows how forms looks in their environment and some browsers/operating systems offer rollover states for submit buttons.

² One issue is that if you don’t have any submit or image button in the form you won’t be able to send the form by hitting the enter button on the keyboard. To counterwork this you might want to add another image button or alter the script to hide the submit buttons instead of replacing them.

This question pops up almost weekly on message boards, mailing lists and in chat sessions:

How can I remove the ugly border around an image when it is linked?

I am amazed that this is still a question that needs to be asked, but the trick to remember is that when you put an image inside a link, like:

Then the browser puts a border around the image in the colour of the link. Therefore, changing the link border setting will not have any effect:

a {border:none; }

Instead, you need to set the image border to “*none*”:

 a img {border:none; }

It might be a good idea to define this as a preset in the beginning of your style sheet, to avoid the need to repeat it over and over again.

Also notice that the setting is “border:none”, which tells the user agent that there should not be a border – if you use “border:0” you expect the User Agent to know how to display a border with a width of 0, which might not be possible.

I hope that this is going to be a post to show up high in google sooner or later, much like the ugly yellow form fields one.

I just came back from a quick vacation in Munich, and on the train I wrote a small introduction to pop-under ads for a friend. Personally I am not a friend of ads, pop-up or pop-under, but sometimes you need them.
The main problem I have seen so far is that bad implementations cover the content even when JavaScript is disabled, thus making it impossible for the user to get rid of them.

This article describes how to create user friendly pop-under ads with CSS and DOM and offers an example that only covers the main content and gets a “close” functionality when the browser allows it.

Hopefully you’ll find it helpful.

One of our clients complained that our print stylesheet doesn’t work as the backgrounds don’t get printed.
This is a setting of the browser, not a CSS issue. In MSIE, it is part of the Advanced Options of the Internet Settings:

In Firefox, it is an option in the File – Page Setup dialogue: