Tagged “button”

Question: when presenting users with a means of downloading a file, should you use the anchor element or the button element?

Answer: you should use the anchor element.

In web-based products from e-commerce stores to email clients to accounting software you often find index pages where each item in a list (or row in a table) has a Delete option. This is often coded as a link… but it shouldn’t be.

I liked this comment by Rails developer Dan where he advises a fellow Rails developer that to create his Delete control he should use a form rather than a link, via Rails’s button_to method.

I’ve written previously about the important differences between buttons and links. While reviewing some “component refresh” design mocks at work yesterday I noticed the designs were a bit unclear in this regard so I sent the designers a little decision-tree, which I’m noting here for future reference.

GitHub have recently done some good work on improving keyboard navigation for (and general usability of) their focusable elements such as links, buttons and form controls by improving focus indication. And then they wrote a short-but-sweet article about it, then tweeted to share that and their work is getting lots of positive recognition from all the right people. Nice job all round, GitHub!

On the web buttons and links are fundamentally different materials. However some design and development practices have led to them becoming conceptually “bundled together” and misunderstood. Practitioners can fall into the trap of seeing the surface-level commonality that “you click the thing, then something happens” and mistakenly thinking the two elements are interchangeable. Some might even consider them as a single “button component” without considering the distinctions underneath. However this mentality causes our users problems and is harmful for effective web development. In this post I’ll address why buttons and links are different and exist separately, and when to use each.

A while back, Jake Archibald tweeted:

Don't render buttons on the server that require JS to work.

Jeremy Keith takes us through his thought process regarding the choice of link or button when planning accessible interactive disclosure elements.