Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Use a Submit Button Outside of a Form!

By  on  

Have you ever felt like you've been a professional developer or designer forever, and somehow not known something basic, and borderline hate yourself? That's me with a trick that was introduced to me by Miguel Piedrafita:

To submit a form when the button isn't a child of the parent form, you can use the form attribute:

<form id="myForm">
    <label for="email">Email:</label>
    <input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Email" />
</form>

<!-- Submit button not in parent form! -->
<button type="submit" form="myForm">Submit!</button>

I'm ashamed I didn't know about this form attribute. In that past I've executed CSS magic tricks to accomplish buttons displaying outside of their form area. Did you know about this attribute?!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    WordPress-Style Comment Controls Using MooTools or jQuery

    WordPress has a nice little effect on the Admin Dashboard where it shows and hides the comment control links when you mouseover and mouseout of the record's container. Here's how to achieve that effect using MooTools or jQuery. The XHTML Notice that we place the links into...

  • By
    MooTools dwCheckboxes Plugin

    Update / Fix: The checkboxes will no longer toggle when the "mouseup" event doesn't occur on a checkbox. Every morning I wake up to a bunch of emails in my Gmail inbox that I delete without reading. I end up clicking so many damn checkboxes...

Discussion

  1. Eroan

    I had never heard about it. In 20 years as a web developer.
    That’s why it’s so exciting, even the most “basic” language as html ;)
    So… thanks I guess.

  2. 7nz

    Never heard that attribute,Thanks

  3. Hal Gumbert

    You can do the same thing with inputs. Just add the form attribute!

    I do this to place inputs across several cards. :)

  4. Thomas M

    Holimoli, hours of working out in JS why FF does not allow submit events anymore. Then a pur HTML solution! 22 Years webdev, you never stop learning the basics. Many Thanks!

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!