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
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    Convert XML to JSON with JavaScript

    If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been working on a super top secret mobile application using Appcelerator Titanium.  The experience has been great:  using JavaScript to create easy to write, easy to test, native mobile apps has been fun.  My...

Incredible Demos

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!