cursor:pointer on buttons

Three weeks ago, a discussion took place at a CSS Working Group meeting regarding the issue of "Cursors for base appearance". The group arrived at a resolution, which stated that the CSS Working Group adopted cursor rules in the final comment. This summary revealed that one rule from the final comment mentioned that if all non-button selectors were removed, it would not change the default browser styles.

Instead, it would be a rule for elements that would have an appearance of "base-…". It was emphasized that this user agent style would not be overridden by any !important styles.

It was noted that users who did not agree with the cursor: pointer on buttons and similar elements were free to override it in their own stylesheets. The author of the article, who had previously advocated for this decision in 2013, did not see any new arguments in the debate since 2017.

The author mentioned that many people raised counter-arguments, such as "OS does not do it". They questioned the relevance of this argument, pointing out that operating systems rarely innovate in UI design and often become less user-friendly over time. The author questioned why people would not want to see this change in the OS, implying that it could be a positive improvement.

They observed that many popular apps on their desktop OS, including Cinny, Discord, Signal, Slack, Steam, and VS Code, used cursor: pointer on interactive elements. The author felt that these default cursors did not communicate anything useful and could be improved. They acknowledged the argument that buttons and links should have different cursors, and that regular links should differ from those opened in new tabs.

However, the author argued that with only two cursors to assign, a clear distinction could be made between buttons and links. The author expressed confusion about why anyone would think buttons had more in common with blank space than with links.