How to create an HTML button that acts like a link?

Question

I would like to create an HTML button that acts like a link. So, when you click the button, it redirects to a page. I would like it to be as accessible as possible.

Answer 1

If you want to avoid having to use a form or an input and you're looking for a button-looking link, you can create good-looking button links with a div wrapper, an anchor and an h1 tag. You'd potentially want this so you can freely place the link-button around your page. This is especially useful for horizontally centering buttons and having vertically-centered text inside of them. Here's how:

Your button will be comprised of three nested pieces: a div wrapper, an anchor, and an h1, like so:

.link-button-wrapper {
    width: 200px;
    height: 40px;
    box-shadow: inset 0px 1px 0px 0px #ffffff;
    border-radius: 4px;
    background-color: #097BC0;
    box-shadow: 0px 2px 4px gray;
    display: block;
    border:1px solid #094BC0;
}
.link-button-wrapper > a {
    display: inline-table;
    cursor: pointer;
    text-decoration: none;
    height: 100%;
    width:100%;
}
.link-button-wrapper > a > h1 {
    margin: 0 auto;
    display: table-cell;
    vertical-align: middle;
    color: #f7f8f8;
    font-size: 18px;
    font-family: cabinregular;
    text-align: center;
}

    
        
Button!
    

Here's a jsFiddle to check it out and play around with it.

Benefits of this setup: 1. Making the div wrapper display: block makes it easy to center (using margin: 0 auto) and position (while an is inline and harder to positionand not possible to center).

2. You could just make the display:block, move it around, and style it as a button, but then vertically aligning text inside of it becomes hard.

3. This allows you to make the display: inline-table and the

   display: table-cell, which allows you to use vertical-align: middle on the

   and center it vertically (which is always nice on a button). Yes, you could use padding, but if you want your button to dynamically resize, that won't be as clean.

4. Sometimes when you embed an within a div, only the text is clickable, this setup makes the whole button clickable.

5. You don't have to deal with forms if you're just trying to move to another page. Forms are meant for inputting information, and they should be reserved for that.

6. Allows you to cleanly separte the button styling and text styling from each other (stretch advantage? Sure, but CSS can get nasty-looking so it's nice to decompose it).

It definitely made my life easier styling a mobile website for variable-sized screens.