4 ms·

Buttons do something. Links go somewhere. Don't cross the streams.

• commandlinefan 6y ago
  > Buttons do something > Links go somewhere Well... all the way back to HTML 1.0, form submission buttons also "went somewhere". It was quite a while before the concept of any interaction not reloading the entire page came along. There's nothing wrong with buttons that go somewhere, and a lot of the web is designed around this.
  • giantrobot 6y ago
    No, form submit buttons did something i.e. submitted the form. While this had the effect of going somewhere the expectation was straight forward and obvious. Using forms as links was roundly advised against.
• Ronson 6y ago
  This is really the best advice in a nutshell.
• marcosdumay 6y ago
  There are many applications where "doing something" technically means going into another URL, and interacting with it. Those should be links anyway (the technical meaning beats the UX one), but I see no problem on styling them as a button. Just don't style buttons as links.
  • thex10 6y ago
    > Just don't style buttons as links. My designers keep doing this, sadly. I mean, they don't _realize_ they're doing this. But they will have an element on the page where a user clicks on it to do some action (not navigate to another page), and they will style it to match the site's links. It unfortunately seems to be a very popular pattern.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]