draft-duerst-mailto-bis-05 - Detailed review of Get form submission and the To hvalue

<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-duerst-mailto-bis-06>

The following should submit "mailto:?subject=test" to the default mail client (whether that's Thunderbird, M2 or Outlook or Gmail etc.). The to=test value is dropped because GET submissions drop '?' and everything after it.

<form action="mailto:?to=test" method="GET">
    <input name="subject" value="test">
    <button>submit</button>
</form>

Now, with the following, you'll either get "mailto:test?subject=test" or "mailto:?subject=test" depending on how you interpret the mailto spec.

<form action="mailto:test" method="GET">
    <input name="subject" value="test">
    <button>submit</button>
</form>

The mailto spec says that "mailto:test" is equivalent to "mailto:?to=test". If so, then you can see why an implementation might drop the 'test' value. But, you can also look at it the other way and say that according to generic form submission, the To value should stay.

This means that 'mailto:test' and 'mailto:?to=test' are NOT equivalent as far as form sumbission goes. A note about this in the mailto spec (or some new mailto form submission spec) might help clear this up.

<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/forms.html#submit-mailto-headers> currently defines the 'mailto:' GET, PUT and DELETE submission as having different behavior between 'mailto:test' and 'mailto:?to=test'.

-- 
Michael

Received on Wednesday, 11 March 2009 22:12:43 UTC