Re: Forms, mailto-URLs, and The Right Thing

Steinar Bang (steinarb@falch.no)
Fri, 27 Jan 1995 17:32:47 +0100


>>>>> Rob Hartill <hartill@ooo.lanl.gov> writes:
>> The Right Thing here would be:
>> Where the action attribute in a <form> element is a "mailto" URL, and
>> the method attribute is "post", create a message on the fly and send
>> the contents of the <input>s of the form to the mail address given by
>> the URL

>> And I would very much like to see other browsers copy the Netscape
>> approach.

> .but not if that means sending URL encoded mail to human readers when
> the form explicitly asks for plain text to be sent.

> i=Mail+which+looks+anything+like%0D%0Athis+isn%27t+particularly+readable%0D%0Ais+it+%3F

How about a variant of the way you used to handle updates for the
Movie Database? (don't know if you do it this way anymore. Been a
while since I contributed...:-).

The form containing the fields call a CGI script. This CGI script
creates a HTML document containng a form. The <form> consists of a
textarea containing the formatted text and a "submit" input, with a
"mailto" to whatever human is supposed to receive the data as the
<form>'s "action".

Pretty much as it used to be, but instead of coming from
whateveridthehttpisrunningon@www.cm.cf.ac.uk the formatted mail is
sent from whatever the mail address of the browser is set to
(hopefully the address of the contributor, but in any case an
improvement over whateveridthehttpisrunningon).

- Steinar