Question

Why qa-q-view-buttons, qa-a-view-buttons are formatted as html buttons ? It's little bit to complex to edit for my needs. Why they just not formatted as normal links like qa-q-view-meta ?

Answer 1

The reason is about semantics rather than what they look like. They are buttons because they do some action such as flag or comment. But they are styled to look like links.

Part of it is related to the fact the buttons post back to the server. Although Q2A uses Javascript and AJAX now, you need buttons for graceful degradation.

Are you having a specific problem with styling the buttons? You should be able to do almost anything.

Comments

Indeed, it would be dangerous to make them links because every now and again someone creates a "web accelerator" which pre-fetches content by clicking al the links on a page. On the web, links should never be used for actions which modify data.

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wow, never heard of that - nice to know :)

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Yeah there's an old story about some early Wiki software that had all the "delete" actions as links. A search engine spider came through and deleted all the content by following the links! (Although in that case it was sort of their own fault for not having any authentication on the page.)