I was searching for buttons the other day that I could use for a project. I wanted something flexible, something that could easily be customized for any project. The buttons have to be dynamic and they need to be generated fairly quickly.
This means no buttons that contain text images, no buttons that contain color images. The text needs to be supplied from the source (HTML) as well as the background color from CSS.
This dynamic button needs to be generated on fly, with the flexibility to use it multiple times within a page or the whole website. This sounds like a tall order to me.
Enter a tutorial by Soh Tanaka, a web designer from Los Angeles that I found while searching online. He wrote “Liquid & Color Adjustable CSS Buttons.” The tutorial is actually quite good. He shares how a button can be quickly generated using the supplied anchor text and as well any CSS background color.
I love the buttons, but I found a couple of issues. The buttons doesn’t really work as a Submit button. You’re going to have to use Javascript to send your form if you use this example. The other issues is you can’t really resize the button, since it’s constrained to single supplied image that’s generated for every button.
These buttons are definitely useful tools for creating sites, but it does have its limitations. One more thing, I want to try if this works with HTML4’s button tag as opposed to just using the input tag.