[thelist] old school question

[Simon Perry]

Dan McCullough wrote:

>Wicked old school don't know why he is doing it this way but its not my
>call.
>Anyway have a friend who has a form and he isn't usually any form
>handling except for validation on client side via JavaScript.  Doing a
>simple mail to.
>Anyway I thought there was a way to submit the form to an email address,
>instead he has it as a mailto which opens an email which makes no sense
>since he is asking people to fill out a form, and then they have to then
>redo the information in the email..
>
>What was the old way of just submitting a form to an email without
>having to actually open your email client or use a form handler.
>
>  
>
Not sure you could ever do quite what you are saying above, email with 
no form of transport magic ;-)

Your friend could use the validated form contents to create a custom 
mailto link with all the data in it. Now YMMV as to email client support 
but something like this[0] should work...
<A HREF="mailto:test at test.com?Subject=test%20it&Body=hello%20world">Link 
Text</A>
The '%20' or '+' will have to be added by his script so that spaces are 
gracefully  handled, oh and 'Body' appears to be case sensitive in some 
email clients.

A server side mail handler, and not Matt's FormMail[1], would be a far 
better solution.

Simon

[0] http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/husted_mailto/mailto.html
[1] http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/