[7402] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Forms, mailto-URLs, and The Right Thing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steinar Bang)
Fri Jan 27 12:11:06 1995
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 17:33:25 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: steinarb@falch.no
From: Steinar Bang <steinarb@falch.no>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
>>>>> 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
