h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A24545072

The linked button on that page works fine in Firefox but does a big heap of nothing in IE. Is this a known bug or have I done something wrong? I had a look at the 'Known Bugs With Browsers' page but it's not mentioned there, and the page is a tad out of date.

The button originally had a couple of smileys in it which I've taken out, but to no avail.

You're doing well for it to be working in Firefox. Button functionality was supposed to be deliberately disabled on h2g2 and Firefox must somehow be circumventing that. The button also works in Opera. Jim Lynn will have to try harder.

Surely if it was disabled it wouldn't work with the <./>GuideML-GUESTBOOK</.> tag.

That's a special GuideML gadget where the inclusion/use of it in the code is under Jim Lynn's control, so it can't be used for naughty things.

Do you know if 'naughty things' were the reason it was disabled? It's quite a nice little button.

I'm fairly certain that "naughty things" were the reason - but it would take quite a lot of effort to find the discussion threads from that long ago.

Certainly more effort than it's worth!

Well I've just been through about a thousand threads on the most obvious forum without success.

However, looking at the way you've coded that one on your page (as a button not an input) and the displayed source which follows on from that, it looks as though something else is going on. The button tag wasn't originally supported by any browsers when it was first introduced in the HTML 4.0 standard. It looks as though Internet Exploder is capturing the mouse focus for the button and not passing that back to the link (the "a" tag) containing it. Whereas, Opera and Firefox do refer the control back.

Traveller in Time trying many browsers
"It is an InternetExploder only phenomena, apparently the is concidered an like function, the Exploder can not decide where the link should be pointing to.

This is like what the exploder sees:
Da'_Bruvver'ooo
It cannot jump to both locations so it decides not to jump at all. "

OK I've done some offline tests now with the equivalent code (ie A not LINK and no fancy class stuff). IE definitely doesn't like doing anything with its buttons (if they don't have any extra onclick etc attibutes anyway). Whereas Opera is happy to have vanilla buttons within links. Reversing the nesting order doesn't help.

It was just a guess that got me to try the button at all, thought I'd try it after seeing it in the GUESTBOOK. The thing that seems odd to me is that IE sees the URL and displays it in the bottom left but doesn't go there when clicked: I'd have thought that if can see the URL it would go there when clicked and ignore the fact that it's on a button, but I'm probably just showing how little I know of such things!

I'd best go back to putting links in little tables.