Re: Addition to the FORM tag

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Brent Maxwell <brentm@geocities.com> sent this
to the www-html list:

(Could there be a way to email form data without CGI?)

First off, some browsers do this already, like this:

<form action="mailto:local-part@domain" method="post">

Second, it's not a great idea.  Even the browsers which allow this have
only gone halfway in the execution and have shown no sign of getting it
"right".  One would expect that the form data would be reduced to ASCII
and placed in the body of an email message, but in fact it is URL
encoded.

This is fine for forms where the action sends the data to a script, but
it is not helpful for people.  It also has the drawback of eliminating
any HTTP response to the sending of the form data, which confuses some
users into thinking that the form was not sent and sending it again.

OTOH, though it can be a pain to write the script needed to process a
form, it only needs to be done once.  After you have a working script to
collect the data, you can reuse it any time you have the need.  All you
need to do is modify it to point to another script (which actually
processes the form) or the email address.  If you're stuck on the script
you don't even need to write it from scratch - there are many form
handling scripts out there which could be tweaked to work for you.

Dave

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Received on Sunday, 22 September 1996 23:47:42 UTC