Posting forms
<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="mailto:you@your.e-mail-address"> You try that with a form in IE 3.02 and it just throws a mail window at you, that does not contain any form variables. Mosaic behaves a bit more weirdly ù it has the form variables in the subject line, which makes the message invalid. As far as I know, the described method works only with Netscape, which in any case sends an unformatted bunch of variable values to the recipient. A better method is as follows. Ask your ISP's technical support people if they have a CGI script to post mail. Most ISPs will have one. Then use this within the ACTION subtag, for example: <FORM ACTION=http://www.myisp.com.au/cgi-bin/sendmail/wsendmail.exe METHOD="POST">. Whenever I come across the described Netscape mailing method, I always complain to the respective Webmaster. One may dislike Microsoft as much as one wishes, but IE is now very popular, and form-mail should cater for that. Please have this tip corrected in the next issue! û Waldis Jirgens
I just got the March issue of PC World and saw that Belinda Taylor recommends a method for posting a form in HTML ("Interactive Web pages", p147), which does not work with IE 3.02 and lower versions:
Category: Internet
Issue: May 1998