I’ve always been a little confused by sites that add strange bits of code to the end of their email links. The non standard markup up usually comes in the form of ‘mailto:person@website.com subject=subjectitle’. Never seemed quite right. So I looked it up and found why not to use ?subject= in your webpage email links.
Published on June 26, 2003
Filed in Web design
Guy @annegambles you mean all the thousands of pounds spent on that annoying TV jingle has passed you by? #
This site is being redeveloped. Apologies if things don't look or act as you expect. I'm spending little bits of free time making some much needed changes.
GuyWeb is the personal website of Guy Carberry, a web designer based in Buckingham, England. He currently works full-time as a web designer for the Open University. He also undertakes interesting freelance projects where time allows. You can contact Guy by emailing Guy at this website's address.
test
October 14th, 2003 at 8:45 am
I find the supplied link a bit misleading.
There is nothing about a mailto: link that is related to form processing. The result of clicking a mailto link is not a form submission. Why does the auther of the linked article look at the FORM part of the spec?
A mailto: link is just that.. a link. It’s a URL.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt
and search on that page for section “3.5. MAILTO”
here we see that only an email address is expected, and no other information is implied.
So why do some people still put subject, body, cc and bcc fields? Like here:
http://hsc.usf.edu/~kfly/work/mailto.html
Because the HTTP spec also says that &’s in a form submission are strictly speaking ‘disallowed’. And who has implemented this?
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/appendix/notes.html#h-B.2.2
The spec is the spec, but real-world is a bit different.
October 15th, 2003 at 11:54 pm