alt Hacker NewsYou can have button actions today by wrapping the button in a form tag. The article even shows this. The implication seems to be somehow that this is no good because what if you're already in a form tag? The answer is to move the two actions which aren't actually related to the form outside of the form tag and give them their own unique form parents.
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I had the same thought at first, but the example in the article convinced me. It's something I ran into when I did webdev.
Form tags usually contain other elements - textboxes, checkboxes, etc. The url and method are specified on the form tag and not the button, so if you want a second submit button that goes to a different URL or use a different method, you need to duplicate all the other inputs in a separate form tag with your button.
All of this can be done with scripting, but the point of this proposal is to make that unnecessary.
And don't forget about the `form` attribute to associate a button with any arbitrary form element by ID.
What if I want the cancel button to be to the left of the submit button? This is how GitHub lays out those buttons, for instance. There's fundamentally no reason why a button's functionality should be dictated by its position on the page.
The proposal has an in-depth explanation of why this and other workarounds (like using the `form` attribute and a bunch of dangling forms) aren't sufficient.[0]
[0] https://triptychproject.org/proposals/button-actions#existin...