Enter triggers button click

I have a page with two buttons. One is a <button> element and the other is a <input type="submit">. The buttons appear on the page in that order. If I'm in a text field anywhere in the form and press <Enter>, the button element's click event is triggered. I assume that's because the button element sits first.

I can't find anything that looks like a reliable way of setting the default button, nor do I necessarily want to at this point. In the absence of anything better, I've captured a keypress anywhere on the form and, if it was the <Enter> key that was pressed, I'm just negating it:

$('form').keypress( function( e ) {
  var code = e.keyCode || e.which;

  if( code === 13 ) {
    e.preventDefault();
    return false; 
  }
})

As far as I can tell so far, it seems to be working, but it feels incredibly ham-fisted.

Does anyone know of a more sophisticated technique for doing this?

Similarly, are there any pitfalls to this solution that I'm just not aware of?

Thanks.

Solution 1:

Using

<button type="button">Whatever</button>

should do the trick.

The reason is because a button inside a form has its type implicitly set to submit. As zzzzBoz says, the Spec says that the first button or input with type="submit" is what is triggered in this situation. If you specifically set type="button", then it's removed from consideration by the browser.

Solution 2:

It is important to read the HTML specifications to truly understand what behavior is to be expected:

The HTML5 spec explicitly states what happens in implicit submissions:

A form element's default button is the first submit button in tree order whose form owner is that form element.

If the user agent supports letting the user submit a form implicitly (for example, on some platforms hitting the "enter" key while a text field is focused implicitly submits the form), then doing so for a form whose default button has a defined activation behavior must cause the user agent to run synthetic click activation steps on that default button.

This was not made explicit in the HTML4 spec, however browsers have already been implementing what is described in the HTML5 spec (which is why it's included explicitly).

Edit to add:

The simplest answer I can think of is to put your submit button as the first [type="submit"] item in the form, add padding to the bottom of the form with css, and absolutely position the submit button at the bottom where you'd like it.

Solution 3:

Where ever you use a <button> element by default it considers that button type="submit" so if you define the button type="button" then it won't consider that <button> as submit button.