Enter triggers button click

Question

I have a page with two buttons. One is a <button> element and the other is a <input type="submit">. The buttons appear on the page in that order. If I'm in a text field anywhere in the form and press <Enter>, the button element's click event is triggered. I assume that's because the button element sits first.

I can't find anything that looks like a reliable way of setting the default button, nor do I necessarily want to at this point. In the absence of anything better, I've captured a keypress anywhere on the form and, if it was the <Enter> key that was pressed, I'm just negating it:

$('form').keypress( function( e ) {
  var code = e.keyCode || e.which;

  if( code === 13 ) {
    e.preventDefault();
    return false; 
  }
})

As far as I can tell so far, it seems to be working, but it feels incredibly ham-fisted.

Does anyone know of a more sophisticated technique for doing this?

Similarly, are there any pitfalls to this solution that I'm just not aware of?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Using

<button type="button">Whatever</button>

should do the trick.

The reason is because a button inside a form has its type implicitly set to submit. As zzzzBoz says, the Spec says that the first button or input with type="submit" is what is triggered in this situation. If you specifically set type="button", then it's removed from consideration by the browser.