On May 7, 2005, at 22:04, Ian Bicking wrote:
There'd be a design bug somewhere if the UI wasn't affected! When something looks like a link to, the user has a good reason to expect that following the link causes a safe retrieval operation. When something looks like a button, the user has a reason to understand that pressing the button may cause an unsafe operation.
Without Web Forms and nested forms, it *is* a bug to effect the UI in the ways that would be required, because isolated controls cannot be put inside the context of a larger form that submits to a different location and performs a different action.
The canonical approach is making one form that encloses everything on the page. That way, you can sprinkle submit buttons wherever you like.
And there's other much more safe operations that also cause side effects.
If there are noticeable side effects (ie. something written in a log on the server does not count), GET is inappropriate.
so that their UIs better represent (in those developers' opinions) the functionality they are providing.
I don't think it follows that POST links are needed but that submit buttons need an alternative appearance that makes them more suitable to be packed in a table representing Web mail messages, etc. (I am not suggesting that form widgets be arbitrarily stylable. That doesn't work nicely with UI themes developed after Windows 3.1. I am suggesting a style property like button-type: grid-item; for selecting for a predefined list of button styles.)
What you are suggesting degrades to something unsafe. Styling submit buttons would degrade to something safe but perhaps ugly.
I'm just trying to explain why this "incorrect" practice is so common.
I can think of the following reasons:
1) A very large number of people doing Web stuff are clueless and incompetent.
2) Many people haven't gotten in the habit of making page-wide forms.
3) A link is less verbose to type than a submit button.
4) Many people find submit buttons bulky and the buttons cannot be universally styled to be less bulky.
I think the last one is a big deal when the graphics deezyner overrides RFC 2616. But things that please them belong in CSS.
-- Henri Sivonen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
