I love going to our weekly web talks not so much for the talks themselves (although they are great), but conversations you get to have there. A part of a recent one rendered from memory and shortened for readers pleasure:

Fry: Those delete strings of yours should really be post requests. GA’s pre-fetching might destroy user’s data.
Me: <beeeeep> Google. RFC says should not must.
Fry: Well, since it also says multiple GET requests should yield same result, it really is a must for delete.
Me (not ready to give up): True, but so many form buttons will look like crap.
Fry: Well, you can hide them by removing border, setting background-color to background and fixing font size to 1 em.
Me: Uhm, this might work, but probably doesn’t, because browsers use controls from operating system.
Fry: Well, try it.

I may be stubborn, but I’m not a complete moron. So I did and here’s the result .

As can be seen, it works beautifully in Firefox (1.0+) and Opera 8 (I share my visitors indifference to earlier versions). It doesn’t work in Safari at all, but since its buttons are not obnoxiously ugly, I can live with that.

However, it has unseemly big padding in Internet Explorer, which is the real deal-breaker for now.

I think demo’s style sheet is pretty self explanatory, but here’s what I did by mostly following Fry’s instructions:

• set border to 0
• same for padding and margin
• set background-color of the button to the same value as background of the document
• did the same for color of text
• set the size of button text to 1 em so it’s displayed in right size in every browser
• set cursor to pointer, since it’s not done automatically for buttons

Fry was also correct that bold and italics work and underline doesn’t, but you can simulate later with border-bottom. Except in IE of course, on account of padding.

There’s another shortcoming to consider. If background is an image or a color gradient instead of a solid color, this trick won’t work.

So, any ideas about what to do with IE?

Talk is behind me and I’d like to thank all who came and especially to those, who stayed through the whole thing.

Looking back, there are certainly things I’d do differently, if I got the chance, but at least it wasn’t a horrendous experience for me and the audience like my last talk a few years ago was.

I’ll post my slides of dubious value later today or tomorrow at the usual place and I’ll try to prepare a Lessig-like webcast over the weekend. I hope to see everyone next week on Tuesday. Boštjan Ber??i?? will talk about responsibility of publishers on web, a talk that everyone who publishes on the web in Slovenia should probably hear.

Well, I’ve jumped the gun. It seems IPRED2 has been derailed (at least for a while).

Still, better this than being right.