Submitting a form by pressing enter without a submit button

forms, html, submit

Solution

Update 2022: Use this instead

<input type="submit" hidden />

Notice - Outdated answer

Please do not use `position: absolute` in the year 2021+. It's recommended to use the `hidden` attribute instead. Otherwise, look down below and pick a better, more modern, answer.

Try:

<input type="submit" style="position: absolute; left: -9999px"/>

That will push the button waaay to the left, out of the screen. The nice thing with this is, you'd get graceful degradation when CSS is disabled.

Update - Workaround for IE7

As suggested by Bryan Downing + with `tabindex` to prevent tab reach this button (by Ates Goral):

<input type="submit" 
       style="position: absolute; left: -9999px; width: 1px; height: 1px;"
       tabindex="-1" />

Problem

Well I am trying to submit a form by pressing enter but not displaying a submit button. I don't want to get into JavaScript if possible since I want everything to work on all browsers (the only JS way I know is with events). Right now the form looks like this: ``` <form name="loginBox" target="#here" method="post"> <input name="username" type="text" /><br /> <input name="password" type="password" /> <input type="submit" style="height: 0px; width: 0px; border: none; padding: 0px;" hidefocus="true" /> </form> ``` Which works pretty well. The submit button works when the user presses enter, and the button doesn't show in Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera and Chrome. However, I still don't like the solution since it is hard to know whether it will work on all platforms with all browsers. Can anyone suggest a better method? Or is this about as good as it gets?

Original source