Building a Disbled vs. Enabled Save Button

Question

Hello. I have built a Save button which starts off in a
disabled state, then gets enabled as soon as the user changes
anything in the form. As it turns out, There's a problem with using
'onchange' since it is not recognized by the DOM until the changed
<input> item loses focus, and the user may desire to press
the Save button immediately after making the change, which he
cannot do since it will remain disabled until he moves the cursor
off the <input> where he made the change. To solve that
problem, I am using 'onkeypress', which lets me enable the Save
button right away.
That actually doesn't work for a <select>, nor do we
want it to, since if the user presses 'N', for example, when the
value of the <select> is already 'N', we don't want that to
be treated as a change. For that situation, it turns out that
'onchange' is the way to go, since indeed the change in this case
is recognized by the DOM right away, without waiting for a change
in focus.
But now for the conundrum: The DOM does not consider
Backspace to be a keypress. It also does not regard Tab as a
keypress, which .is definitely how we want it to behave, since
nothing changes when the user tabs from one <input> field to
another. Sometimes that might be what we want for Backspace, too
(backspacing over spaces at the end of text, for example?). But
Backspace is in fact destructive of whatever character is to the
left of the cursor when Backspace is pressed, and that's a change.
In fact, IN SOME CASES, IT IS THE REMOVAL OF A CHARACTER - AND ONLY
THAT - which contsitutes the change the user is making. But this
key press will not fire the onkepress event, so will not let me
enable the Save button when it's the only change which occurs.
Ouch!
I haven't tried them all, but the set of events available for
<input> tags does not look promising. None appears to have a
definition which would solve this problem.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Okay, it's not really necessary, but it's a lot cooler, and I
hate to abandon it. Since my original post, I have discovered in my
O'Reilly Dynamic HTML book (Appendix C, p. 1026) that IE simply
does not pass through the Backspace and Delete keystrokes although
Navigator does, as I have verified with Firefox. I consider this a
hugely stupid design decision on the part of Microsoft, so I'm much
more willing now to bite the bullet and try to become
Firefox-aware. Still, though, I may keep my disabled vs. enabled
button, and provide users with Help doc explaining the difficulty
(which I will blame on Microsoft), plus a possible solution: all my
Save buttons are inside of <TD> cells, which have an onclick
event by which I could trigger enabling the button which they
contain. Clicking the still-disabled button will be a solution
which will naturally occur to many users. On the other hand, my
client does not care as much about the 'esthetics' of the
application as I do, and my just go for a more kludgy solution
which is less likely to result in a few user phone calls. (I
realize that kludgy is in the eye of the beholder.) Thanks again
for your help.
Peyton
[email protected]