Re: Subject line in Mailto forms

In article <v03102800afc9ddcc6a6c@[205.149.180.135]>,
Walter Ian Kaye <walter@natural-innovations.com> wrote:
> At 11:35a +0200 06/15/97, Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet wrote:
>  > 1) it breaks all other clients, as RFC 1738 defines the value of
>  > mailto to be an email address only. Thus, mail from those clients
>  > will bounce, as "htmlhelp.com?subject=hello" is not a valid host.
> 
> So update the client -- it's easy to add support for this. 

Perhaps, even though the RFC would have to be superseded in order
to make this behaviour legal. And as far as I can tell, most
other HTML extensions were generally harmless in that they simply
weren't available (or were ignored) on non-supporting browsers.

>  > 4) You only have 1024 characters for subject and other headers (assuming
>  > you do 2).
> 
> You don't need more than that -- it's only meant for creating a template
> email message, not a long dissertation. 1024 characters is a lot! :)

Well, if it's only for a ?subject, but if you want to generalize
this method (the draft mentioned earlier in this thread supports that)
then you can run into that problem quickly.

>  > or perhaps adding an attribute a la USEMAP (USEAPP? PARAMLIST?)
>  > to A that links to a list of parameters, then you could even re-use
>  > the information in multiple mailto links.
> 
> And how would you pass that to other applications? 

User agent issue. The browser can collect the PARAMs and create
a command line for that, or parse it through an OLE communication
or whatever.

-- 
E-mail: galactus@htmlhelp.com .................... PGP Key: 512/63B0E665
Maintainer of WDG's HTML reference: <http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/>

Received on Monday, 16 June 1997 13:40:56 UTC