alt Hacker News> Copying, sharing, bookmarking—these are all features for re-contextualizing the action of a link. Buttons serve a complimentary purpose because they don’t allow for any of that.
This sells me on the opposite of what the author is saying. If, because some jackass decided that to open a page in a different window I need to click the button, copy the URL, then go back and open a new tab, then paste, that's a terrible experience. This proposal presupposes that the developer is smarter than the user (they're frequently not!). There's functionally no reason to do this. It doesn't add anything for the user, it only takes things away in the name of making it feel "more native".
> Should “Cancel” be a link? No! Its job is to close the edit view.
I've been building websites for 25 years and I've literally never had this problem. And that's partially because "Cancel" is pretending you're in a desktop app with desktop idioms. No real, actual person designs websites like this. And the number of people who are doing zero styling but who also care about the distinction between a link and a button is vanishingly small.
It's simple: just stop trying to be clever. Design a website like you're writing hypertext.
Replies
Author addresses almost all your criticism in the material after the first few paragraphs.
For example, that government sites enforce accessibility even without js.
Some of us do work on web apps not websites. Two different things. Websites should not be web apps. Web apps should take advantage of links when possible.
The rigid mentality of everything in a browser must conform to some supercilious standard all to keep things “pure” I will never understand. We can have things like figma. It is ok for web apps to exist on the internet.
> And that's partially because "Cancel" is pretending you're in a desktop app with desktop idioms. No real, actual person designs websites like this.
If I click "Edit" on a GitHub comment, it shows me two buttons, "Cancel" and "Update Comment." Patterns like this can be found all over the web on sites you certainly use.
> There's functionally no reason to do this. It doesn't add anything for the user, it only takes things away in the name of making it feel "more native".
There are many functional differences between buttons and links and it's not true that links are strictly more capable. Buttons, for instance, can be activated with the spacebar.
> I've been building websites for 25 years and I've literally never had this problem.
I included a link that showcases how this problem exists both in Django itself and for developers who build websites with Django.[0] This is representative of a durable, hypertext-driven, webapp design that the proposals are intended to support.
[0] https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/jul/15/supporting-...