I've come across 3 issues with IE when using buttons, especially with a form containing multiple instances of buttons. This forum provided me the most insight (though not complete), so I wanted to share my findings. If you have come across better solutions, please chime in.

Please note that I have to stay away from JavaScript, because our users like to be able to perform all of the actions from Treos, Blackberrys, etc. Therefore, I need a purely server-side solution.

As far as I can tell, Firefox, Opera, Safari comply with the HTML specification, and IE does not seem to comply with the following 3 issues.

1. Value of <button> not handled properly in IE

<button name="abc" value="xyz"> Go to Next Step </button>
All browsers, except IE, will pass name-value pair of "abc" and "xyz", and display "Go to Next Step" on the button. However, in IE, the "value" attribute is ignored and the actual value passed is "Go to Next Step". This is quite annoying, but can be worked around.

2. Inside a form with multiple buttons, clicking on one button will submit values for all buttons in IE

This problem exceeds being annoying, and will necessitate changing your code. If one has a form with multiple button actions, the only way to determine which button was pressed is to use <input type="submit"> or <input type="image">. <input type="submit"> is annoying, because the "value" attribute is used both as the value and the display string. But this is nothing compared to ...

3. <input type="image" name="abc" value="xyz"> only submits x and y coordinates in IE

This is truly awful. On HTML-compliant browsers, the following parameters will be passed, with corresponding values:

abc xyz
abc.x 5 (example ... 5 pixels from left)
abc.y 8 (example ... 8 pixels from top)

However, with IE only the .x and .y values are passed:

abc.x 5 (example ... 5 pixels from left)
abc.y 8 (example ... 8 pixels from top)

I have a rather complicated form with many input fields and a section to upload a file, download files in the repository, and show revisions of files in the repository. In order to preserve all the information in the input fields, even if the user uploaded/downloaded/or checked revisions before submitting the form, all of these elements are in one form. What's more the "download" and "show revisions" functions enumerate over arbitrary number of files. I was using the "value" attribute to pass the filename for these functions, but it won't work with IE.

The work-around was to prefix the "name" attribute with the function (either "download" or "showrev"), and to suffix it with the filename (i.e. desired "value"). For example:
<input type="image" name="download_Q2results.xls">
<input type="image" name="showrev_Q2results.xls">
<input type="image" name="download_Q3results.xls">
<input type="image" name="showrev_Q3results.xls">

So, basically making the "name" attribute a composite of the "name" "value" pair.

Then, since I prefer not to add conditional code based on client browser type, I would look for the longest parameter that starts with "download_" or "showrev_". Then, I would substitute out trailing ".[xy]". I do this because it is possible to have the original filename end in .x.

Anyway, the following is the code snippets to make a complex multi-input, multi-button form work in both Firefox and IE.

From script that creates the input form:
print "<input type=\"image\" name=\"download_$file\" value=\"$file\" src=\"$webroot/downArrow.png\"> $file </input>\n";

From script that determines which button was pressed:
@params = param;
if ( @downloadFile = grep ( /^download_/, @params ) ) {
foreach $x ( @downloadFile ) {
if ( $downloadFile ) {
$downloadFile = $x if ( length ($x) > length ($downloadFile) );
} else {
$downloadFile = $x;
}
}
$downloadFile =~ s/^download_//;
$downloadFile =~ s/\.[xy]$//;
}

if ( $downloadFile ) {
... download file ...
}

Anyway, I don't use IE, so I didn't even suspect anything will be broken in IE for such a server-side-heavy application. Then, after finding out the IE issues, trying to figure out what exactly was not working was very tedious. In the end, with a little work, one can still do pretty much anything with pure-server-side computing. Perl makes it easy.

Maybe there are more elegant ways or completely different solutions to the above, and I would really appreciate hearing about them. Please be reminded that original problem statement starts with a very complex form where one section has many input elements, and another section has file upload/download/show rev actions. In the middle of editing the input fields, user might decide to upload/download/showrev files, and when they return, they don't want their work to have disappeared. There is a "submit" button at the bottom to submit the edited input fields. Use of JavaScript or ActiveX is not allowed.