Buttons

Button basics

in jQuery Mobile, buttons that are used for navigation are coded as links and those that submit forms are coded as button elements.

Buttons in page content

In the main content block of a page (data-role="content"), any link that you want to look like a button needs the data-role="button" added to the link to tell the framework to style the link as a button.

<a href="index.html" data-role="button">Link button</a>

Creates this button:

Link button

A button element or an input with a type of submit, reset, button, or image will all be automatically transformed into a custom styled button, no need to add the data-role="button" attribute. We found it was impossible to consistently style link and native form buttons consistently across platforms so the framework actually generates a new link-based button for each form button button and hides the original. When a click event fires on a the link button, it triggers a click on the original form button.

<button>Button submit</button>

Creates this button:

Button submit

Icon options

Icons can be added to buttons by adding a data-icon attribute on the anchor to specify the icon to display. There a core set of standard icons included in the framework. To minimize the download size of the core icons, jQuery Mobile only includes these icons in white and automatically adds a semi-transparent black circle behind the icon to make sure it has good contrast on all background colors.

<a href="index.html" data-role="button" data-icon="arrow-r">Link button</a>

Creates this button:

Link button

By default, icons in buttons are added to the left of the text, but the data-iconpos attribute specifies the icon position: left or right of the text. To create an icon-only button, set the data-iconpos to notext and the button plugin will hide the text and add it as a title attribute on the link to provide context for screen readers and devices that support tooltips. In this example, we're adding a plus (+) icon and positioning it to the right of the text with our data- attributes on the link.

<a href="index.html" data-role="button" data-icon="arrow-r" data-iconpos="right">Link button</a>

Creates this button:

Link button

To use custom icons, specify a data-icon value that has a unique name like myapp-email and the button plugin will generate a class by prefixing ui-icon- to the data-icon value and apply it to the button. You can then write a CSS rule that targets the ui-icon-myapp-email class to specify the icon background source. To maintain visual consistency, create a white icon 18x18 pixels saved as a PNG-8 with alpha transparency.

Inline buttons

If you have multiple buttons that should sit side-by-side on the same line instead of stacked like the default buttons, wrap the buttons in a container that has a data-inline="true" attribute. This will style the buttons to be the width of their content and float the buttons so they sit on the same line.

<div data-inline="true"> <a href="index.html" data-role="button">Cancel</a> <a href="index.html" data-role="button">Save</a> </div>

Grouping

It's possible to group a set of buttons together to form a single block of buttons that look contained like a navigation component. To get this effect, wrap a set of buttons in a container with the data-role="controlgroup" attribute and the framework will create a vertical button group. This removes all margins and drop shadows between the buttons and only rounds the top and bottom buttons to get the effect that they are group together.

<div data-role="controlgroup">
	<a href="index.html" data-role="button">Yes</a>
	<a href="index.html" data-role="button">No</a>
	<a href="index.html" data-role="button">Maybe</a>
</div>

Creates this button group:

By default, grouped buttons are presented as a vertical list. By adding the data-type="horizontal" attribute

to the control group container, you can swap this to a horizontal style group that floats the buttons side-by-side and sets the width to only be large enough to fit the content. Be aware that these will wrap to multiple lines if the button number of text length is to wide for the screen.

Theming

jQuery Mobile has a rich theming system that gives you full control of how buttons are styled. When a link is added to a container, it is automatically assigned a theme swatch letter that matches it's parent bar or content box to visually integrate the button into the parent container, like a chameleon. So a button placed inside a content container with a theme of "a" (black in the default theme) will be automatically assigned the button theme of "a" (charcoal in the default theme). Here are examples of the button theme pairings in the default theme. All buttons have the same HTML markup:

Button can be manually assigned any of the button color swatches from the theme to add visual contrast with the container they sit inside by adding the data-theme attribute on the button markup and specifying a swatch letter.

			
<a href="index.html" data-role="button" data-theme="a">Theme a</a>			

Here are 4 buttons with icons that have a different swatch letter assigned via the data-theme attribute.

Theme a Theme b Theme c Theme d

Buttons in bars

When buttons are placed inside header or footer bars, they are styled a bit differently than in the body. To save space, buttons in bars are styled with a smaller text size, less padding and only enough width to fit the text and icons inside. The toolbar documentation has full details on the styling options of button in bars.