Web Forms for MAT 153 (Updated)

A SCRIPT generated by the Cinch-O-Matic will not work until you remove enctype= "text/plain" from the form tag that you created in class. This code snippet tells the browser to send the form data in plain text. The PHP script created by the Cinch-O-Matic requires that the transmitted text be URLencoded, which the browser will do by default when the user presses "send." enctype= "text/plain" overrides the default, so that the scripted process breaks.

The mailto process, on the other hand, requires plain text. One thing to keep in mind when creating a mailto form is that users without a mail client installed will press "send," without any result. Nor will they necessarily receive an error message. And if they do, they may not understand what they get, so that they will go on with their lives thinking that you are a boob for having ignored them.

URLENCODING EXPLAINED:

URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set.

Since URLs often contains characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted. URL encoding converts the URL into a valid ASCII format.

URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits corresponding to the character values in the ISO-8859-1 character-set.

URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a + sign.

--W3C Schools

A tutorial on using the script generator is here.

Tango Hosting requires that the "From" field contain your student name and the tangostudents.com domain. So, your "from" should read something like this: student100@tangostudents.com. Otherwise, your email will simply evaporate when the script is fired. The "Thank you" page will show, but the email--without any error message--will simply fizzle.