Re: [Lynx-dev] input type=button

[David Woolley]

> > Could lynx be modified  to handle <input type=button> as a standard
> > type=submit?  I am running into  an increasing number of forms which
> > use the type=button syntax and lynx ignores them.
> 
> Perhaps - I had not noticed this one (I did notice that lynx does not
> implement type=range, but probably a button is simpler to model - 
> compare to radio or checkbox).

What's being asked for here is a hack.  It assumes that all that the
in-accessible web site does is to validate and then submit the form,
so that treating the button as a submit will work (although it
make exploiting security problems in the application easier).

However, whilst there are people who are so enamoured with procedural
solutions that they don't realise that they can do validation in an
onsubmit action (technically this requires a Javascript implementation
that honours true and false returns from event handlers but ones that
didn't are very few these days) and in a way that gracefully degrades,
quite often what actually happens on activating input type=button is
that the form data is copied into a second, hidden, form and that is
what is actually submitted, with the result that the hack won't work.

Even if a separate form isn't used, it is likely that some hidden field
gets updated, or even that the form action URL is modified.