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
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You&#8217;ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

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!