Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / CSS / February 2007

Scripsit Pablito:

This is primarily a matter of functionality, not styling.

The safe way is to make the button disabled in JavaScript. (If you make it
disabled in HTML markup, there's the risk that it is _always_ disabled,
because the browser might have JavaScript turned off.)

The default appearance in most browsers is then "grayed-out".

You can then try to affect its appearance as well. It's probably easiest to
do that in JavaScript, too, e.g.

<input id="foo" type=submit name="foo" value="bar">
<script type="text/javascript">
var fld = document.getElementById("foo");
fld.disabled = true;
fld.style.color = "blue";
fld.style.fontFamily = "Courier";
</script>

Here I set the color and font-family for demonstration only. You will see on
IE for example that the font-family setting takes effect while the color
setting does not - presumably because the browser uses built-in system
routines for rendering disabled fields.