Home/ Questions/Q 1101989
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-17T01:06:51+00:00

I’m trying to figure out something having to do with the behavior descibed by

  • 0

I’m trying to figure out something having to do with the behavior descibed by this old question from last year. I’ve got a form with a single input text field, and a single “submit” button. Unlike the person who asked that question, I want the form to submit when the user hits “enter”. Indeed, that’s working for me; what’s not working however is the quirk that causes a “submit” input in the form to be virtually clicked: Firefox and Chrome include the “submit” input’s name in the parameters posted, while IE does not. In other words, I want this quirky submit behavior to post the text input field, and the submit input too.

The funny thing is that my form was doing just that up until some mystery change I introduced recently. (Firefox and Chrome do still work, but IE once worked and now doesn’t.) I can probably figure out what I changed to break it, but as @bobince seemed to understand something about this quirk I figured I’d ask to see if there are known (possibly even documented) ways to control it.

Here’s my test page: http://gutfullofbeer.net/post.html

It’s about as simple a test as I could make up:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <body>
    <form name='foo' action='cgi/echoparams.cgi' method='post'>
      <input type='text' name='name' value=''>
      <input type='submit' name='submit_button' value='Submit'>
    </form>
  </body>
</html>

The cgi script just parrots back the posted content.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Yeah, sorry, it’s not directly fixable. I don’t know what your previous ‘working’ case was, but I suspect there might have been an extra input present. (It’s only when there’s a single text input that the exceptional behaviour occurs.)

    With the historical mines around the question of whether a default-submit button is ‘successful’, it’s better never to rely on it. Add the hidden input to signify a submission and omit the name on the submit button. Put any submission scripting on form onsubmit rather than the default button.

    If you have additional submit buttons for different actions (eg. Edit vs Delete), then make the first button perform the ‘default’ action and set no name, then add name/values that override the default behaviour on the other buttons. These are sure to be ‘successful’ (and will receive a click event) if clicked.

    • 0