There's another way to handle form data if you don't want to do any CGI programming; and because many readers of this book don't, I'll take a look at this other technique here. You can have the data in a form emailed to you if you set the ACTION attribute to a mailto: URL. Here's an example. In this case, I'll email a form's data to steve@starpowder.com (a fictitious email address). Note also that I set the ENCTYPE attributethe MIME encoding of the form's datato "text/plain" : (Listing 12-07.html on the web site)<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>CGI Example</TITLE> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> <!-- function checkData() { if(document.forms[0].text1.value == ""){ window.alert("Please enter your name.") return false } else { return true } } // --> </SCRIPT> </HEAD> <BODY> <FORM ID="form1" METHOD="POST" ACTION="mailto:steve@starpowder.com?subject=Web%20page%20email" ENCTYPE="text/plain""> Please enter your name: <INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="text"> <BR> <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" NAME="Submit" VALUE="Submit"> <INPUT TYPE="RESET"> </FORM> </BODY> </HTML> Here's the body of the email that arrives, in plain text because I set the ENCTYPE attribute to "text/plain" : text=Hello Submit=Submit That's how the data will arrive in the emailas name =value , where name is the name of the control and value is the data in the control. Tip The submit method does not work with mailto: URLs for security reasons (so a JavaScript programmer can't get your email address unless you okay it). Sending form data back to a program on the server is fine; of course you don't need to send a form's data back to the server at all, you can create your entire program in JavaScript and run it all in the browser as we're doing throughout this book. |