GWT Button acts as a submit in WebKit browsers

Keywords:
HTML button element form WebKit Chrome Safari iPhone

Problem:
In WebKit browsers, the Button widget in a GWT application seems to always act as a submit, regardless of event sinking (via ClickListener) behaviour added to it.

In Firefox (and IE!) the button works fine - that is the 'onclick' behaviour added to the widget via the GWT listening architecture is executed and the page is not submitted.

Solution:
A clue to the solution is in the code for the GWT Button (thank goodness for source code - see Button.adjustType(Element button)).

It seems to be a work around for Firefox. The W3C spec states that the default value for button type is 'submit'. Firefox does this explicitly in the DOM and when detected, this is fixed by the GWT JSNI (JavaScript Native Interface) code.

It would seem that for WebKit browsers this default is enforced but not made explicit in the DOM so this GWT snippet does not get a chance to resolve the issue. The work around is to always be explicit about the button type (as recommended in W3Schoools).

You do this in GWT as follows:

     Button b = new Button("click here");
     DOM.setElementAttribute(b.getElement(), "type", "button");