HTML: Submitting a form by pressing enter without a submit button

Question

Well I am trying to submit a form by pressing enter but not displaying a submit button. I don't want to get into JavaScript if possible since I want everything to work on all browsers (the only JS way I know is with events).

Right now the form looks like this:

<form name="loginBox" target="#here" method="post">
    <input name="username" type="text" /><br />
    <input name="password" type="password" />
    <input type="submit" style="height: 0px; width: 0px; border: none; padding: 0px;" hidefocus="true" />
</form>

Which works pretty well. The submit button works when the user presses enter, and the button doesn't show in Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera and Chrome. However, I still don't like the solution since it is hard to know whether it will work on all platforms with all browsers.

Can anyone suggest a better method? Or is this about as good as it gets?

Answer 1

AFAIK, browsers won't set focus to hidden elements -- though, I'm not sure if it'll then disable [Enter] submitting (FF3 and IE7 work).

<input type="submit" style="display: none;" />

Answer 2

Instead of the hack you currently use to hide the button, it would be much simpler to set visibility: collapse; in the style attribute. However, I would still recommend using a bit of simple Javascript to submit the form. As far as I understand, support for such things is ubiquitous nowadays.

Answer 3

You could try also this

<INPUT TYPE="image" SRC="0piximage.gif" HEIGHT="0" WIDTH="0" BORDER="0">

You could include nonexistent image, or image with width/height = 0 px

Answer 4

Try:

<input type="submit" style="position: absolute; left: -9999px"/>

That will push the button waaay to the left, out of the screen. The nice thing with this is, you'd get graceful degradation when CSS is disabled.

Answer 5

Have you tried this ?

<input type="submit" style="visibility: hidden;" />

Since most browsers understand visibility:hidden and it doesn't really work like display:none, I'm guessing that it should be fine, though. Haven't really tested it myself, so CMIIW.

Answer 6

I think you should go the Javascript route, or at least I would:

<script type="text/javascript">
// Using jQuery.

$(function() {
    $('form').each(function() {
        $('input').keypress(function(e) {
            // Enter pressed?
            if(e.which == 10 || e.which == 13) {
                this.form.submit();
            }
        });

        $('input[type=submit]').hide();
    });
});
</script>


<form name="loginBox" target="#here" method="post">
    <input name="username" type="text" /><br />
    <input name="password" type="password" />
    <input type="submit" />
</form>

Answer 7

I can't think of any reason to hide the submit button. It doesn't look like a good idea from a usability point of view.