Non-Web Links and Protocols
Linking to other web pages using the HTTP protocol is by far the most common type of link, but there are several other types of transactions that can be made using other standard Internet protocols.
Mail Link (mailto:)
The mailto
protocol
can be used in an anchor tag to automatically send an email message
to the recipient, using the browser’s email application or an
external email application. Note that the browser must be configured
to support this tag, so it will not work for all users. The
mailto
protocol has the following components:
mailto:username@domain
A typical mail link might look like this:
<A HREF="mailto:jen@oreilly.com">Send Jennifer email</A>
You can also experiment with adding information within the
mailto
URL that automatically fills in standard
email fields such as Subject or cc:. As of this writing, these
additional functions are supported only by Navigator 4.0 and higher,
Internet Explorer 5 (Mac), and Internet Explorer 5.5 (Windows), so
use them with caution and do lots of testing:
mailto:username@domain?subject=subject mailto:username@domain?cc=person1 mailto:username@domain?bcc=person2 mailto:username@domain?body=body
Additional variables are appended to the string with an ampersand
(&
) symbol as follows:
mailto:username@domain?subject=subject&cc=person1&body=body
Spaces within subject lines need to be written as
%20
(the space character in hexadecimal notation).
The following is a sample mail link employing these additions:
<A HREF="mailto:jen@oreilly.com?subject=Like%20your%20book">Email ...
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