On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 04:08:09PM -0700, neil@civicspacelabs.org wrote:
The use of HTML links, such as 'Cancel,' along side form_submit() will be more common in the future. I am planning on changing all the Delete buttons, which should go to a confirmation page, to links. I don't think that this has been fully documented, but I think it is an accepted de facto standard now. The main rule of thumb is that links should never change anything.
I was expecting (and hoping to avoid) some debate of the basic issue. I certainly didn't expect this reaction. I was sceptical of the links next to buttons idea at first. The reasons that convinced me to approve of this approach are: - Helped visually distinguish the actions. You probably want to click 'Delete' rather than 'Cancel.' - Buttons do POST and links do GET, which fits with what the respective actions actually did. In my recent work trying to standardize on links for 'Delete' which go to a confirmation page I found it was actually significantly easier to do all the destination handling if I was doing links. I did find one supporting weblog at http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/web_forms.html. You should probably review his logic as well; it is near the bottom. I wanted to do something really simple, but I think I need to bake the concept of primary and secondary actions into a heavier API closer to what Adrian suggested earlier in this thread. I'm don't think theme control of something being a link or button is realistic, that is just asking for problems to arise since the two have rather different properties. For the button vs. link debate for non-consequential secondary actions- this seems like a holy war and the *only way* to resolve this issue once and for all would be doing some user testing. Any volunteers for helping design a test to get valid results and anyone willing to find and provide incentive for test participants? -Neil