[kdewebdev-webdeveloper] Form Problem

[Hamster]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 14:43:39 +1100
Graeme Nichols <gnichols at tpg.com.au> wrote:

> Hi H., Thanks for the info and the offer of help but my ISP gives me
> 10M  of web space and no sefver side scripting facilities at all. I
> checked  it out with them before I wrote the form. My HTML text book,
> 'Web  Publishing with HTML 4 in 21 Days by Laura Lemay' indicates that
> the  mailto: works OK, but, unless I have coded something wrong, it
> doesn't  work OK.

The problem is that the vast majority of those HTML books are written by
people who are good at making pretty pages as opposed to people who
actually have a clue about the technologies they're working with.

Most of these authors aren't aware that OSs apart from MS exist, and
think the only two browsers in use are IE and Netscape.

When a book makes a claim that something works, but in practise it
doesn't, the best thing to do is to view the actual W3C specification
for HTML. 

The forms page is found at
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#adef-action

For you, the most interesting sentence on that page is where the form
'action' is defined. It states: 

<quote> User agent behavior for a value other than an HTTP URI is
undefined. </quote>

In a nutshell, anything other than action="http://" is not defined by
the specification and so will be different in each different webbrowser.
Which is why the mailto: only works for specific combinations of
webbrowser and mailclient.

I see someone else has replied suggesting you make use of websites
offering form processing. Seems to me the best way to go.

If you really run into problems, I can set up a page on my website that
emails you the results of the form submit. Provided of course you don't
expect thousands of responses :)

H.