Help submitting a form

Question

This was working but has suddenly stopped for some reason. I can't see what's wrong. Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong here? I'm using an onclick event in a span tag then calling this function.

Firefox reports: Error: document.forms[0].submit is not a function

 function submitlogin() {
 document.forms[0].submit()
 }
<form method="post" id="submit" action="something.asp">
 <span id="button" onclick="submitlogin()"></span>
</form>

---

This is what the form looks like

 <form method="post" id="myform" action="">
 <div>
 <input type="text" id="name" name="name" />
 </div>
 <div id="btn-container">
 <span id="button" onclick="submitlogin();"></span>
 </div>
 </form>

• Capt Otis: Do you even need to use javascript?
• jim: Well, I'm using a background image that has a button on it. I've had to use css to align the x and y coords of that button then use javascript to submit the form. Is there a better way?
• Carles Barrobés: you can apply the css style to the button instead of replacing it with a span. E.g. see app.portasigma.com/login.jsp where we nicely style a button
• jim: @Carles, thanks for the link. It will be very helpful, indeed. Always learning something new. :)

Answer 1

document.forms[0] is searching for a <form> in your code, which you don't have. A quick fix could be

<script type="text/javascript">
 function submitlogin() {
 document.forms["myform"].submit();
 }
</script>
<form method="post" id="myform" action="something.asp">
 <span id="button" onclick="submitlogin()">hello</span>
</form>

• jim: I do have a form tag. It encompasses the span tag
• jim: Capt, From inside the function, I can alert the id. I get: [object HTMLSpanElement]. Not sure if this helps
• Capt Otis: This edit should work, sorry I had a typo before. Notice I changed the id of the form to "myform" rather than "submit". I get paranoid that some browsers will not run the code correctly if you use keywords like that.
• jim: I agree with you and was exactly why I changed it too. :) Let me give your edit a try. brb
• jim: No Capt. I get this error: Error: document.myform is undefined