I am trying to use the tag "mailto" in an HTML file to prompt the user to email me. Specifically, I want to have the subject and the body of the email message already filled in when the user sends me the email.

So far, I have managed to have a hyperlink where the body is already filled in:

<a href="mailto::username@gmail.com?body='test'">this works</a>

I have also managed to have a hyperlink where the subject line is already filled in:

<a href="mailto:usernamegmail.com?subject='the subject'">this works too</a>

But I have yet to figure out how do combine the two:

<a href="mailto::username@gmail.com?subject='the subject and
the body'?body='test'">help</a>

Does anyone know how to do this?

can't be done with HTML

some server side code is required

ok, to start, just a friendly (we are not harsh, here) explanation:
There is no "tags" in html.

You have an "a" node, or element, with an "href" attribute.
I may look like picnitting, but if we all use the same names for the same things, we will understand each others better.

Secondly, I get that you are not very used at web page creation.
No offense, we all started somewhere...

an URL, placed in a href attribute can be composed of several segments.
There are:
°The protocol (http://, ftp://, file://)
°The subdomain (www)
°The domain (whatever)
°The extension (.com, .org. .net)
°The port (:80)
°The pathname (/page/1.hml)
°The search (?a=1&b=2)

In your case, you want to compose a "search" element into your href attribute.
The fact is, that the ? character is used to delimit the start of the search element.
Every subsequent key=value pairs must be separated by ampersand (&).
So, in your case, you need to use

<a href="mailto::username@gmail.com?subject='the subject and
the body'&body='test'">help</a>

Originally Posted by tripy

ok, to start, just a friendly (we are not harsh, here) explanation:
There is no "tags" in html.

Now I am very confused. I am just starting out with learning html, and maybe I have somehow misunderstood them, but every html book and website that I have ever seen calls start and end tags.........."start and end tags." Elements represent headings, paragraphs, hypertext links, lists, embedded media, and a variety of other structures.

well, it seems (to me) that the definition evolved in a relatively short span.
That, and as I tend to relate html to xml (my job), I may have a more "scolar" view over it.

For my, a heading is a <h?> element, or node and attributes (say with me: "there are no alt node on an img element..." ).
An element in a HTML way of representing it, a node in the DOM document tree (which is an xml tree, by the way).

If you take a look at the w3c defintion of html (say, 4.01) http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#html-index you will see that there are no reference to any tags. But only elements.

let me just finish by saying that everything is relative, and you should not bound yourself to one strict definition.
My paragraph above was intended to be more informative that formal, sorry if it sorted out like that.

If your book talk about tags, so be it, but take in account that a more recent publication might talk about elements or nodes, and that in this case, they are the same thing.

What Thierry is referring to is the fact that "mailto:" is NOT a tag.

It is a value for the href attribute of <a>nchor elements.

A "tag" refers to either the start or end delimiter for an element.

Ok.....I think I see what you guys mean. Thanks for explaining that!

I believe I have figured out why you are so confused tripy. http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/index/elements.html as you can see there the elements, such as h1 (the header 1 element) starts with a <h1> tag and ends with a </h1> tag. http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#elements that there talking about the elements (again, h1 not <h1>) speaks about the nodes in DOM which represent the elements, not the elements as nodes themself. So yes, HTML has elements, but not <h1> is not an element, it is a tag that represents the element to the browser.

I believe I have figured out why you are so confused tripy.

I am confused !???
I did not knew.


You know, I will not argue, because it's something too relative, in the end.
It reminds me of Magritte's paint "ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe) which represent a pipe. Meaning that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

I'll just stay to my ground, considering that there are no tags (as for my native language, French, a "tag" relate to something that you add to describe more in detail something else. Close to a label, I believe, in English).
In that view, I compare a tag to a metadata which is attached to something, and in my case, the html element.
This is how all my colleagues both at my work place and over the net are referring to them and it's all I need.

The tags are the labels though. The tag labels/marks how the browser should display or interact with something. The tag <h1> marks that everything after that should be displayed big and bold. The </h1> tag tells it that it should stop displaying things big and bold. The <a> tag indicates that all the things after it are linked to the area the the hypertext reference (href) points to, and that selecting any of them should be rendered as opening that thing that it points to.

I'm not going to say "ok", because I don't share your view upon that.
For me, it's a DOM document, with all it's node from the start. At the moment the server sent it.
You consider it's a description of the representation the browser should create.

I don't say you are wrong, but it's relative, and from my angle, it's an XML (well, SGML in fact) tree from the start.

Originally Posted by tripy

You know, I will not argue, because it's something too relative, in the end.
It reminds me of Magritte's paint "ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe) which represent a pipe. Meaning that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

That is funny! I have done quite a few trompe l'oeil paintings myself. They really can make you believe that something is there when it's not.

This is really not worth arguing over, but just to add to the discussion, here's how wikipedia defines the tags and elements.

Tags and Elements

I stand corrected, then.