Web Design in a Nutshell

Non-Web Links and Protocols

Linking to other web pages using the HTTP protocol is by far the most common type of link; however, 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 from within the browser. 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:[e-mail]">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 only supported by Netscape 4.0, 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 a & 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:[e-mail]?subject=Like%20your%20book">Email for Jen</A>

FTP Link (ftp://)

You can link directly to a file on an FTP server. When ...