Stopping IE from highlighting the first submit-button in a form

Question

The expected behaviour on enter in a form seems to be undefined in the HTML 4.01 Specification while the HTML 5 specification says it should be the first submit button in th

Answer 1

ASP.Net 2.0 also introduced the concept of DefaultButton.

This is available on atleast Form and Panel elements:

So, when you load the page, or are entering text in TextBox1, pressing Enter will submit Button2. When you are entering text in TextBox2 pressing Enter will submit Button3 - as you are inside the Panel.

This is powered by an onkeypress method created by ASP.Net.

When the page loads, IE and Firefox both highlight Button2 (as you want).

If you know which button will be declared as the defaultbutton, you can use what ever CSS you would normally use to style this for all browsers.

Rather annoyingly, when you focus either text box, IE will then (incorrectly) highlight Button1.

This is because IE's default behaviour is overridden by some javascript emitted by ASP.Net:

But, IE will then ignore that once another element has focus, and go back to highlighting the wrong button (which doesn't get used unless the user explicitly clicks it in this example).

Other than replacing them with image buttons, I'm not sure what else I can suggest.