Use only anchor or button for click actions

[jandudulski]

Use anchor (a HTML tag element) when click should change page url. Use button type="submit" if click would submit a form. Use button type="button" for any other click actions (e.g. next page with ajax loading, toggle view etc).

[venticco]

input type="submit" is good too, but button type="button" is crucial for buttons inside form that are not dedicated to submitting of this form.

[teamon]

Seems legit.

[sheerun]

ok

[hodak]

I'll just add that it's important to add type="button" because this attribute defaults to submit so just button will try to send the form.

[tallica]

What if I need to use <a> tag combined with ng-click="foo()", what should I put inside href attribute?

• No href attribute
• Empty href=""
• href="javascript:void(0)"

In many places the last option is suggested

cc: @venticco @hodak @tommy92 @jandudulski @teamon

[venticco]

If you need to have ng-click action, then you should use <button>, if it need look and behavior of link then use CSS to make it looks like one. <a> without href attribute is improper, empty href can lead into wrong behavior, and last option looks and feels ugly, because of inline JS code.

[tallica]

Yeah it's ugly hack, I know... the problem is that bootstrap uses <a> tags in the components like dropdowns. I would have to change CSS to use buttons.

[hodak]

Hmm, that's a good point. I think in this case it's justified to use a. Do you know the reason behind the javascript:void(0) and why it would be better than href=""?

[tallica]

Not really. Maybe we should combine href="" with prevent-default directive in such cases?

[jandudulski]

@tallica drop the bootstrap :smile: