have link act as button?

DKY

I have a php page that submits to itself whenever a button is pressed and says

if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {

to run some mysql that inserts data into a table but gets that data by doing

$usercheck = $_POST['username'];

to gather the data.

I have an instance where I want to use <a href> instead of <input type='submit' and was curious how I would handle this. I know that I can handle it by giving <a href a long url like

<a href='<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?>?submit=y&username=bob'

and then having something like

if (isset($_GET['submit'])) {

at the top of my page but isn't there an easier way to do this so that I don't have to pass all my input box data through a URL?

johanafm

If it's all about presentation, that is you have no practical need to use a link, but want a "clickable text", you could style your button to look like a link rather than use a link. Assuming you actually use a button rather than a submit

<style type="text/css">
/* match only inputs of type button that have class="linkstyle"
    submits or any other element with linkstyle class would not be affected */
input.linkstyle[type=button]
{
	border: none;
	background: none;
}
</style>

DKY

That's interesting. I didn't know I could do that. Do you know of any examples I could d/l and play with to get the feel of how it's supposed to work? This would totally help me with what I'm looking for but i'm more of a hands on learner...

johanafm

You can pretty much style anything as anything, even though support for some things is sketchy or downright missing in some browsers. For example, list elements have no pseudo class :hover in IE7 or less, which means that you'd not be able to style list elements as anchors and get this :hover-behaviour.
And then there are obviously specification related things that differ. An anchor can't post a form (without javascript) so you can't style an anchor to act like a submit button. You can however get a submit button to work like an anchor (in this regard) by setting the form's action attribute to "GET".

But what you are asking for is nothing but the CSS 2.1 specification, which tells you exaclty which attributes exist and what values they take. Doing this is no different at all from specifying element widths, fonts, visibility, layout, float etc with style rules.

After the CSS spec comes the painful experience of finding out what browsers do and do not support specific things. But for examples etc, just google for "css 2.1" with additions of tutorial, guide or example.