69825 - Enter key handled inconsistently on forms

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 54035

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect)

Description

[jsp]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; 0.8) Gecko/20010215
BuildID:    2001021508

Forms that have a single input are submitted when the Enter key is pressed, even
if preventDefault() and stopPropagation() are called in a keypress event
handler. Forms that have multiple inputs are not submitted when the Enter key is
pressed.

Behavior should be consistent and subject to control by event handlers.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1) Load the attached test case.
2) Put the focus in the first input, press Enter, and observe the response.
3) Repeat 2) for each of the remaining inputs.

Actual Results:  Forms with a single input are submitted, even if a keypress
event handler attempts to prevent it with stopPropagation() and preventDefault().

Expected Results:  Consistent behavior, controllable by event handlers,
regardless of the number of inputs. I would not expect Enter to submit ANY of
the forms in the test case, but if it's desirable to have it do so, I'd expect
it to behave the same on forms with multiple inputs, and to respect
preventDefault() and stopPropagation() in keypress event handlers.

Also manifests in M 0.8 on Macintosh.

I'm guessing at the correct component. Form Submission or HTML Form Controls are
other obvious possibilities, but this seemed like the best fit.

If it's decided that letting Enter submit is desirable, this is probably two
bugs: one to get Enter behaving consistently, one to get the event handler's
efforts respected.

Authors can work around this by setting up a form submit event handler that
always returns false. You'll need to call the form.submit() method yourself when
you want the form submitted; the good news is that the submit event handler
doesn't interfere with this.

Comment 1

[jsp]

Attachment: Test case.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bgu 22526, "Enter in text input submits form iff there is exactly one 
text input".

Comment 3

[jsp]

Similar but not identical. Matthew Thomas' proposed spec would address at least
part of my problem, since he proposes activating whatever submit control is
appropriate given his rules, and my page has no submit control. Presumably, in
the absence of such a control, the form would not be submitted.

If Matthew's spec is implemented in such a way that Enter keypress events on the
input in a single-input form can be caught, my concerns would be completely
addressed. (I don't actually much care what the default behavior is, as long as
I can catch the event and override that behavior.)

Comment 4

[Keyser Sose]

Moving to UI/design & marking NEW.

Comment 5

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

This ain't a UI design problem, it's an Event Handling problem (or possibly an 
HTML Form Controls problem).

Comment 6

[joki (gone)]

The fact that you can't cancel the submission with the enter key is a dupe of 
bug 54035.  A discussion of the second part about whether or not we should 
submit forms with multiple text fields on Enter is covered in bug 22526.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 54035 ***

Comment 7

[Madhur Bhatia]

QA contact updated