If necessity is the mother of invention, then clients are the source for interesting programming problems, and the need to solve those problems are a never-ending source of discovery for programmers. Such was the case for a recent project in which a lot of data had to be entered quickly and efficiently into an HTML form. The customer was accustomed to using spreadsheets, and wanted, most specifically, for the form to replicate the action of a spreadsheet when pressing enter. To put it plainly, they wanted the focus to go to the next row when they pressed enter.

The normal behavior for a form is that the browser will submit the form when enter is pressed (unless the element is a multi-line text area). Preventing this is easy enough using jQuery's keypress() event and listening and acting on the keyboard input as appropriate.

One of the biggest mistakes that I feel that Drupal has made is that it is difficult for non-administrators to create accounts for other users.  While at first blush this seems appropriate, there are many, many valid reasons that users should be able to create accounts on behalf of other people.  The problem is that, in all versions of Drupal (at least 5-8) there is a call to drupal_goto() inside the form generation function that is executed unless the user has the "administer users" permission.

This is bad!  I actually feel that this is a defect, in that the code should not perform a redirect when generating a form!  Returning nothing would be much preferred!

That being said, I have had 3 sites in as many months that needed the functionality of one individual (not an administrator) creating an account for another user.  The general method presented here is not without difficulty, as you may have to do other altering of the form in order to get it to do everything that you want it to, but the code shown here will provide the basic functionality.