[bastawhiz]

> Copying, sharing, bookmarking—these are all features for re-contextualizing the action of a link. Buttons serve a complimentary purpose because they don’t allow for any of that.

This sells me on the opposite of what the author is saying. If, because some jackass decided that to open a page in a different window I need to click the button, copy the URL, then go back and open a new tab, then paste, that's a terrible experience. This proposal presupposes that the developer is smarter than the user (they're frequently not!). There's functionally no reason to do this. It doesn't add anything for the user, it only takes things away in the name of making it feel "more native".

> Should “Cancel” be a link? No! Its job is to close the edit view.

I've been building websites for 25 years and I've literally never had this problem. And that's partially because "Cancel" is pretending you're in a desktop app with desktop idioms. No real, actual person designs websites like this. And the number of people who are doing zero styling but who also care about the distinction between a link and a button is vanishingly small.

It's simple: just stop trying to be clever. Design a website like you're writing hypertext.

[alexpetros]

> And that's partially because "Cancel" is pretending you're in a desktop app with desktop idioms. No real, actual person designs websites like this.

If I click "Edit" on a GitHub comment, it shows me two buttons, "Cancel" and "Update Comment." Patterns like this can be found all over the web on sites you certainly use.

> There's functionally no reason to do this. It doesn't add anything for the user, it only takes things away in the name of making it feel "more native".

There are many functional differences between buttons and links and it's not true that links are strictly more capable. Buttons, for instance, can be activated with the spacebar.

> I've been building websites for 25 years and I've literally never had this problem.

I included a link that showcases how this problem exists both in Django itself and for developers who build websites with Django.[0] This is representative of a durable, hypertext-driven, webapp design that the proposals are intended to support.

[0] https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/jul/15/supporting-...

[bastawhiz]

> If I click "Edit" on a GitHub comment, it shows me two buttons, "Cancel" and "Update Comment."

Cancel doesn't navigate. In fact, neither of them do.

> Buttons, for instance, can be activated with the spacebar.

If it's visually a link, you're not using the spacebar to activate it. If you've taken the twenty lines of css to make a button look like anything other than the default browser styles, you can add the two lines of progressive enhancement JavaScript to handle space.

> I included a link that showcases how this problem exists both in Django itself and for developers who build websites with Django.

The example the Django project calls out from the Django admin Change form is a really half-hearted example because the delete button isn't an action. It's literally a link to another page with a confirmation step. I have in my life right clicked that very link and opened it in a new tab. Moreover, there's no cosmetic benefit because they already style everything to look custom, so you're not even saving the CSS. Making that link into a button serves nobody, said as someone who maintains Django applications.

[alexpetros]

> Cancel doesn't navigate. In fact, neither of them do.

This is correct. The point of the proposal is that you should be able to implement this pattern with just navigations, and that implementing it differently doesn't change the user semantics.

> If you've taken the twenty lines of css to make a button look like anything other than the default browser styles, you can add the two lines of progressive enhancement JavaScript to handle space.

One important stakeholder for the proposal is governments and other websites that care about building accessible web experiences that work without JavaScript enabled. There are also many differences in the behaviors that can't be rectified with JavaScript (some examples are in the original article as well as the linked proposal).

[robinson7d]

While editing one GitHub comment I may be writing another. If you must, implement it as a link, but all else equal I’d prefer keeping the other state alive when canceling one comment-edit. Doing both is cool too, but people don’t typically want to implement a feature twice.

[lelanthran]

Author addresses almost all your criticism in the material after the first few paragraphs.

For example, that government sites enforce accessibility even without js.

[rustystump]

Some of us do work on web apps not websites. Two different things. Websites should not be web apps. Web apps should take advantage of links when possible.

The rigid mentality of everything in a browser must conform to some supercilious standard all to keep things “pure” I will never understand. We can have things like figma. It is ok for web apps to exist on the internet.

[bastawhiz]

I'm not disagreeing with you. A button with an action serves neither a website developer nor a web app developer. Neither group pretends they're a native app. The web has fundamental idioms that people have gotten used to for thirty five years. If it takes you to another page and it's not submitting a form, you should be able to treat it the same everywhere. If I'm in figma, I'm smart enough to know what looks like something that'll navigate the browser. You don't need a new element to accomplish the same action.