Emailing Forms | Inside JavaScript

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.