Thanks to CSS it should be easy to make a button look like a link, that’s what I thought when I started. But as usual when I work with CSS, what seems to be easy is not that easy… Anyway, here is the solution:

First the HTML code. Nothing special here, the only thing to note is that I had to use a “button” instead of an “input” element due to some CSS issues with Konqueror.

<form action="/article/1" method="post">
  <p>
    <button type="submit" class="link"><span>Delete</span></button>
  </p>
</form>

And here the CSS (thanks to Natalie Downe for her article Styling buttons to look like links, from where I got some of the settings below):

button.link {
  -moz-user-select: text;
  background: none;
  border: none;
  cursor: pointer;
  color: blue;
  font-size: 1em;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  text-align: left;
  text-decoration: underline;
  overflow: visible;
  width: auto;
}

This worked fine in Konqueror, but in Firefox there was always a padding of 2px. And of course I had no clue why. As you can see in the CSS snippet above, the padding was already set to 0… Fortunately, I found the solution in a comment of the aformentioned article:

button::-moz-focus-inner {
  padding: 0;
  border: none;
}

To use such link-like buttons in your own application you have to adapt the CSS to your own needs.

Have fun :)

Let’s start with another question: what do we do on the web? We read news, we compare prices, we buy products, we learn, we look at pictures, etc., in short we are interested in content. Content is king. So the design of the sites is not that important. Of course it is more pleasant if a site has a nice design, but that’s not the reason a site is visited. It’s because of its content.

So we can say the web is about content. Ok. But HTML and CSS are primary for design purposes. Hm. Could it be that HTML and CSS are a wrong solution for websites? It is possible. There are some indicators for that:

• HTML and CSS are (too) complex, which makes it difficult for non-technical people to create websites
• too much time must be invested to make a website look correct in the different browsers
• extra work is needed if a website should be accessible for disabled people

What could be an alternative? I think an alternative approach should be similar to plain-text email, with no possibilities to format anything. So it would be really easy to create content, just open an editor and start writing (like writing an email). And you would no longer have to worry about the different browsers, because the content is shown in the way it was entered, with just one font and one font size…

What do you think about this topic?