Clarify the meaning of button in the docs

[gabalafou]

This pull request seeks to clarify the relationship between Sphinx Design buttons and HTML buttons.

It updates the language in the docs. It also fixes an issue where some of the button examples were not inclued in the accompanying code snippet.

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Here's the backstory. This came up for us over at Pydata Sphinx Theme (PST) as we were fixing accessibility issues. We realized that the PST buttons were not actually being output in HTML as <button>s. When I dug in, I realized that the buttons in PST were actually from Sphinx Design. Then I realized that the Sphinx Design buttons were not actually buttons, not in the HTML sense; they're actually links, and therefore it makes sense to use <a> tags rather than <button> tags. That said, I felt there was room for improvement in the docs to make this point clearer, so I created this PR.

There is a separate, related accessibility question about whether links should be styled to look like buttons, but that would require backwards-incompatible changes.

For more information, please refer to Ashlee M Boyer's post, Should I Use a Button or a Link?

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[chrisjsewell]

There is a separate, related accessibility question about whether links should be styled to look like buttons

Heya cheers, the reason they are links, is because sphinx does not have a "concept" of buttons, i.e. no built-in nodes for them. The button roles/directives use the built-in reference and pending_xref nodes: https://github.com/executablebooks/sphinx-design/blob/18fe5dfb025204f0d797ddde3d220e9682e9db70/sphinx_design/badges_buttons.py

It may be difficult to work around this limitation, without any upstream changes in sphinx

[chrisjsewell]

Looks like some change in sphinx is messing up all the tests, I'll have a look

[gabalafou]

Looks like some change in sphinx is messing up all the tests, I'll have a look

Thank you 🙏

[gabalafou]

Heya cheers, the reason they are links, is because sphinx does not have a "concept" of buttons, i.e. no built-in nodes for them.

Yeah, but I actually think it would be a mistake to output either of Sphinx Design's button-link or button-ref as <button>. Both of these represent a thing you can activate to take you to a new location, therefore from my point of view (see the blog post I linked earlier), they are in fact links and should be output as <a> tags, exactly as Sphinx Design is currently doing.

The question I'm getting at is whether it's a good idea for these components to even exist. From an accessibility standpoint, especially when we think of cognitive accessibility and making intuitive, standards-based graphical interfaces, if there is a clear and valid semantic distinction between links and buttons and we want to keep that semantic distinction clear (a lot of assumptions here), then I think it's a mistake to make links look like buttons, or vice versa, to make buttons look like links. Their visual styles should be respectively distinct so as to reenforce the semantic and UX/behavioral distinctions between the two.

My cynical take is that links that look like buttons on the web are more the result of marketing teams wanting to increase click-through rates rather than careful usability considerations.

Granted, I can imagine that there are edge cases where one could argue for making a link look like a button.

I tried to use language in the docs that accords with all of this without going too deep into the details.

[gabalafou]

Gentle bump. Is there anything I can do to help this along?