Forms not using cgi?

[Diane Madrigal]

On Mon, 25 Aug 1997, Stephanie Kraus wrote:

> I have recently been playing around with creating a a reference question
> form to put on our web page.  Since I don't know anything about perl I
> have been struggling with the CGI "stuff".  In the help section of my
> HotDog Pro I came across these sentences:
> 
> "Forms can also be used to send mail to someone.   This can be useful if
> you don't know anything about CGI programming: the form can mail the
> information directly to your account. Information sent this way is not
> formatted, but can still be understoood"
> 
> Has anyone tried this?  Does this mean in the form tag I would use
> ACTION="mailto:wkslibry at crisny.org" instead of sending it to a URL
> containing a script?
> 
> Any experiences using the mailto tag for forms or help you can give
> would be greatly appreciated!

Stephanie:

Although we have a few forms on our site (actually, on the GIS
Clearinghouse, which is hosted by the NYS Library) that are set up this
way, e.g.

	http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/gis/forms/persform.htm
	http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/gis/forms/edform.htm

it's a temporary fix; we're planning to change to a cgi script as soon as
we can.

The information comes in via e-mail, but I can't read it from e-mail;
I have to save it and then open it up in a word processing program, where
I run a macro I created to parse the information so that's it's readable
(in its raw form, the text comes in in one continuous string, with two-
or three-digit codes replacing any punctuation). So there's a couple extra
steps here, although, for the low volume we're receiving so far, it isn't
really a problem.

What *is* a problem is that we've found that some people can't use these
forms, most often because their browsers aren't set up to send e-mail or
because they're using Internet Explorer. (Thank you, Thomas Dowling, for
explaining exactly why IE users were having trouble with our forms.)
Apparently a cgi script would work in both these situations. We're
looking at a script that a colleague just recommended, and hope to have it
up by the end of the month.

Diane Madrigal
New York State Library