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?!

Recent Features

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Printing MooTools Accordion Items

    Sometimes we're presented with unforeseen problems when it comes to our JavaScript effects. In this case, I'm talking about printing jQuery and MooTools accordions. Each "closed" accordion content element has its height set to 0 which means it will be hidden when the...

  • By
    Modal-Style Text Selection with Fokus

    Every once in a while I find a tiny JavaScript library that does something very specific, very well.  My latest find, Fokus, is a utility that listens for text selection within the page, and when such an event occurs, shows a beautiful modal dialog in...

Discussion

  1. 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. 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!