Submitting a form by pressing enter without a submit button?

Question

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?

Answer 1

As far as I know implicit submission is consistent across all browsers (if you are concerned with browser support you need to use JS). This is what the HTML spec says:

Implicit submission

A form element's default button is the first submit button in tree order whose form owner is that form element. If the user agent supports letting the user submit a form implicitly (for example, on some platforms hitting the "enter" key while a text control is focused implicitly submits the form), then doing so for a form, whose default button has activation behavior and is not disabled, must cause the user agent to fire a click event at that default button.

There are pages on the Web that are only usable if there is a way to implicitly submit forms, so user agents are strongly encouraged to support this.

If the form has no submit button, then the implicit submission mechanism must do nothing if the form has more than one field that blocks implicit submission, and must submit the form element from the form element itself otherwise. For the purpose of the previous paragraph, an element is a field that blocks implicit submission of a form element if it is an input element whose form owner is that form element and whose type attribute is in one of the following states: Text, Search, URL, Telephone, E-mail, Password, Date, Month, Week, Time, Local Date and Time, Number.

NOTES:

1.) the only possible caveat is that the input field needs to be focused for implicit submission to work.

2.) You can simply use input[type=submit]{display: none} instead of styling several properties;