Feedback forms (fwd)

[Roy Tennant]

I found this useful enough to add another category to the Library Web 
Manager's Reference Center for "CGI Programs". I also plan on adding John 
Millard's Perl interface to SWISH. If others have links they want to see 
there, let me know. Thanks,
Roy 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 06:44:10 -0700
From: Prentiss Riddle <riddle at rice.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: Feedback forms

| Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 06:23:45 -0700
| From: "Thomas Dowling" <tdowling at ohiolink.edu>
| Subject: Re: Feedback forms
| 
| ACTION="MAILTO:..." is notoriously inflexible as a way to process
| forms--you get what you get and that's all that you get.  After all, you're
| offloading your forms processing to the browser, so it's only natural to
| expect that you have to give up a degree of control.  Not only will any
| given browser offer behavior a little different from what you want, but
| different browsers will offer different behaviors.  On top of that, some
| browsers still don't support this at all.
| 
| ACTION="MAILTO" is a quick and dirty solution at best.  My advice is to
| insist on CGI access.

I agree that ACTION="MAILTO" is problematic.  But I understand why a
site would want to restrict CGI access -- letting users install CGI
programs who are not keenly aware of how to write them defensively is a
security nightmare.

A compromise is possible: insist that your sysadmins install a
general-purpose web-form-to-e-mail CGI script.  Many such scripts exist
(check Yahoo or the usual repositories of CGI scripts).

The web-form-to-e-mail CGI script we use here at Rice is a little
different from most.  It permits web page designers to control not only
the appearance of the form input but the appearance of the resulting
e-mail as well.  It is called "yamform" and docs, examples and source
are available at:

	http://is.rice.edu:80/~riddle/sw/yamform/

If you decide to use yamform, please be sure to install the CGI script
at your own site and not to point at the one at Rice.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle at rice.edu
-- RiceInfo Administrator, Rice University / http://is.rice.edu/~riddle
-- Home office: 2002-A Guadalupe St. #285, Austin, TX 78705 / 512-323-0708