html - Making buttons - <button> or <div>?

Question

I'm wondering what html element to use for buttons on a web page - I'd like to style my 'buttons' like twitter does. For example:

http://twitter.com/twitter

the "more" button at the bottom of the tweet listing - is that a <button> element, or a <div> element? I'd like to know which to use. I think for either <button> or <div> we can supply rollover states and all that stuff to make it look pleasant?

Answer 1

Don't use <div> tags to make clickable elements. Use <a> or <button> elements. This enables browsers with JavaScript disabled to interact with them as expected. Even if your functionality requires JavaScript and there is no reasonable default behaviour you can assign to an <a>, use it regardless - it conveys "clickable" semantics.

In general, choose the tag that most closely describes the function of its content, not the appearance of its content, and avoid unnecessary <div> tags lest your documents suffer from divitis.