Why does forms with single input field submit upon pressing enter key in input

user_158756 0
Viewed 38159

Why is it that a <form> with a single <input> field will reload the form when the user enters a value and presses the Enter, and it does not if there are 2 or more fields in the <form>?.

I wrote a simple page to test this oddity.

If you enter a value in the second form and press Enter, you'll see it reloads the page passing the entered value as if you called GET. why? and how do I avoid it?

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>testFormEnter</title>
</head>
<body>
<form>
  <input type="text" name="partid2" id="partid2" />
  <input type="text" name="partdesc" id="partdesc"  />
</form>
  <p>2 field form works fine</p>
<form>
<input type="text" name="partid" id="partid"  />
</form>
<p>One field form reloads page when you press the Enter key why</p>
</body>
</html>
forms html javascript
13 Answers

The solution I found for all of the browsers that I tested (IE, FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera) is that the first input type=submit element on the form has to be visible and has to be the first element in the form. I was able to use CSS placement to move the submit button to the bottom of the page and it did not affect the results!

<form id="form" action="/">
<input type="submit" value="ensures-the-enter-key-submits-the-form"
                      style="width:1px;height:1px;position:fixed;bottom:1px;"/>
<div id="header" class="header"></div>
<div id="feedbackMessages" class="feedbackPanel"></div>
     ...... lots of other input tags, etc...
</form>
user_6206080
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