Short Version:
Do you know of any way to get an input button (submit) and an anchor tag to render the same visually using CSS and no Javascript?
Long Version:
I'm developing an ASP.NET MVC application. The site contains pages to view the details of or to create or update my models. The page actions are contained at the bottom of the form and typically include Update and Cancel or Edit, Delete and List (if on a details view page). The Update, Edit, and Delete actions post data from a form to the server, while the Cancel and List actions are/can be handled by appropriate GET requests. It's important to note that one of my design goals is to make the site work as identically as possible if Javascript is disabled to the way it does when Javascript is enabled. I also want the UI elements to render the same visually whether the element causes a postback or fires off a GET request.
In order to get the form submissions to work in the absence of Javascript, I think I must use submit buttons. I'm overriding, with CSS, the visually styling of the buttons to render much like the "buttons" on the top of the SO page -- flat, solid-color with plain text. I'd like the actions that generate GET requests to be handled with anchor tags, but I had problems getting these tags and the styled buttons to render identically. There seem to be issues with alignment and font-sizing. I was able to get them close but not identical.
EDIT: Styling differences using buttons and anchors included not being able to get the fonts to render in the same position relative to the baseline within the bounding box and getting the bounding box itself to render at the same size and alignment relative to the container. Things were just a few pixels off one way or the other regardless of my tweaks. If you've been able to get it to work, please let me know. Knowing that it's possible would make it easier to keep trying things until I could get it to work.
One thing I tried was wrapping the GET-actions around a button, styled like the form buttons. This worked great in Firefox, but not in IE7. Clicking on such a button in IE7 didn't propogate the click back to the anchor. What I've come up with now is to create a new form for the GET, using method="GET", associated with the required action. I wrap that around a submit button that has an onclick handler that sets location.href to the URL of the desired action. This renders visually the same and seems to work, even if the form is nested in another form. A minor niggle is that if Javascript is disabled, then my GET url contains a ? at the end instead of being the nice clean url that you would desire.
What I'd like to know is whether anyone else has solved this in a different way that would work better (and maybe require less HTML)? Do you have any other ideas that I could try? Any way to fix the ? on the GET url when the request is submitted as a post when Javascript is turned off?
Sample code below from a details view. I realize that I could (and arguably should) add the onclick handlers via javascript as well, but the code actuall reads better when I do it inline. I'm using HtmlHelper extensions to generate all of the mark up below. I have reformatted it to improve readability.
<form action="../Edit/2" class="inline-form" method="get">
<input class="button"
onclick="location.href='../Edit/2';return false;"
value="Edit"
type="submit" />
</form>
<form action="../Delete/2" class="inline-form" method="post">
<input class="button"
value="Delete"
type="submit" />
</form>
<form action="../List" class="inline-form" method="get">
<input class="button"
onclick="location.href='../List';return false;"
value="List Donors"
type="submit" />
</form>