Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 11/30/07 14:35

Scripsit Toby A Inkster:

> Shelly wrote:
- -
>> If this is the case, then I am left with the single problem of the
>> not having an input button of type submit, but having an image
>> instead.

Huh? _What_ is the problem? If the problem is that you don't have a
normal submit button, get one. ;-) If not, make sure that you are
solving a problem and not creasting one.

> <input type=image src="foo.png" alt="Submit Your Foo Query">

Well, the alt text is too long. The button text should seldom be longer
than one or two words, like "Submit query". And you should also have the
name="Submit query" and value="Submit query", for user agents that use
_them_ and not the alt attribute as fallback.

> If you give that input a name, then the browser should also add x,y
> co- ordinates for the pixel that the user clicked on to the resultant
> URL. Sometimes that's useful. Most of the time it's not.

The coordinates are not included unless there is a name="..." attribute.

But image submit buttons are almost always a bad idea. They are mostly
used for esthetic reasons, but I don't think I've _ever_ seen such a
button that looks better than, say, the default rendering of submit
buttons on XP or Vista. I might say that _some_ of them were a slight
improvement over the "ugly gray buttons" in stone-age browsers that are
mostly used by freaks these days.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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