HTML - <button>

Example

<button name="button">Click me</button>

Description  

The HTML <button> Element represents a clickable button.

Browser Compatibility  

[1] Gecko does not implement this feature yet. See bug 1241353.

Clicking and focus

Whether clicking on a <button> causes it to (by default) become focused varies by browser and OS. The results for <input> of type="button" and type="submit" were the same.

Notes  

<button> elements are much easier to style than <input> elements. You can add inner HTML content (think <em>, <strong> or even <img>), and make use of :after and :before pseudo-element to achieve complex rendering while <input> only accepts a text value attribute.

IE7 has a bug where when submitting a form with <button type="submit" name="myButton" value="foo">Click me</button>, the POST data sent will result in myButton=Click me instead of myButton=foo.
IE6 has an even worse bug where submitting a form through a button will submit ALL buttons of the form, with the same bug as IE7.
This bug has been fixed in IE8.

Firefox will add, for accessibility purposes, a small dotted border on a focused button. This border is declared through CSS, in the browser stylesheet, but you can override it if necessary to add your own focused style using button::-moz-focus-inner { }

Firefox will, unlike other browsers, by default, persist the dynamic disabled state of a <button> across page loads. Setting the value of the autocomplete attribute to off disables this feature. See bug 654072.

Firefox <35 for Android sets a default background-image gradient on all buttons (see bug 763671). This can be disabled using background-image: none.

See Also  

Other elements that are used for creating forms: <form>, <datalist>, <fieldset>, <input>,<keygen>, <label>, <legend>, <meter>, <optgroup>, <option>, <output>, <progress>, <select>, <textarea>.

Specifications  

License