This is probably rare enough that you would probably make a class (e.g. .link-looking-button) that incorporates the reset styles from above and otherwise matches what you do for anchor links.

You can style a link to look button-like Perhaps some of the confusion between links and buttons is stuff like this: <img loading="lazy" src="https://i1.wp.com/css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Screen-Shot-2020-01-08-at-8.55.49-PM.png?resize=264%2C142&#038;ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-301534" width="264" height="142" data-recalc-dims="1" />Very cool “button” style from Katherine Kato. That certainly looks like a button! Everyone would call that a button. Even a design system would likely call that a button and perhaps have a class like .button { }. But! A thing you can click that says “Learn More” is very much a link, not a button. That’s completely fine, it’s just yet another reminder to use the semantically and functionally correct element.

If a link doesn't have a meaningful href, it should be rendered using a <button> element.

I think “buttons do things (configure the download), links go places (request the download)” still holds.

Buttons Do Things, Links Go Places

However, the W3C provides us with an important clue as to who is right: the download attribute.

There seems to be a lot of confusion over when to use buttons and when to use links. Much like tabs versus spaces or pullover hoodies versus zip-ups, this debate might rage without end.

The debate about whether a button or link should be used to download a file is a bit silly, as the whole purpose of a link has always been to download content. HTML is a file, and like all other files, it needs to be retrieved from a server and downloaded before it can be presented to a user. The difference between a Photoshop file, HTML, and other understood media files, is that a browser automatically displays the latter two. If one were to link to a Photoshop .psd file, the browser would initiate a document change to render the file, likely be all like, “lol wut?” and then just initiate the OS download prompt. The confusion seems to come from developers getting super literal with the “links go places, buttons perform actions.” Yes, that is true, but links don’t actually go anywhere. They retrieve information and download it. Buttons perform actions, but they don’t inherently “get” documents. While they can be used to get data, it’s often to change state of a current document, not to retrieve and render a new one. They can get data, in regards to the functionality of forms, but it continues to be within the context of updating a web document, not downloading an individual file. Long story short, the download attribute is unique to anchor links for a reason. download augments the inherent functionality of the link retrieving data. It side steps the attempt to render the file in the browser and instead says, “You know what? I’m just going to save this for later…”