Articles : JavaBoutique's Introduction to Java : Q and A :

Using mailto in applet parameters

Q

Help! I'm rather new at this, just starting to develop a web page and I found a java flag applet which was free to use. Well, I d/l it and it works wonderful. But my question is: I want use the applet as my e-mail button, how do you write in the code for this? I tried many ways, here's an example of one way I tried which did not work:

<APPLET code=Wave.class width=200 height=80>
	<PARAM name=image value="email.gif">
	<PARAM name=mailto value="msburhans@aol.com">
</APPLET>

I have seen examples where they have coded URL's or Links. Is "mailto" not the right expression?

A

Yipes.

I don't think it would be possible for me to answer this question without taking a look at the applet documentation. How you can modify the behavior of an applet really depends on how the applet author has setup her code to accept parameters from the HTML.

Every applet is as different as the developer who coded it. So without seeing the instructions myself, I would have no way of knowing how to do it.

It is important to understand that the values that you plug into an applet using the tag are not really related to Java. In fact they have nothing to do with Java really; they represent an interface that you can use to talk to a program.

The programmer, not Sun, defines them :)

If the programmer has not specifically said in her documentation that she will accept "mailto" as a parameter, then you probably cannot use it and should write to the author and ask her to add that feature.

However, I can make some "guesses".

I would imagine that the author would have specified two types of PARAMs:

<PARAM NAME = "image" VALUE = "my_image.gif">
and
<PARAM NAME = "link" VALUE = "http://www.extropia.com">

In this case, you could change it to:

<PARAM NAME = "image" VALUE = "my_image.gif">
and
<PARAM NAME = "link" VALUE = "mailto:selena@extropia.com">

If there is a

<PARAM NAME = "mailto" VALUE = "x">

Selena Sol contributes to the JavaBoutique's Introduction to Java. Selena curently works for Barclays Capital in London, one of the leading global investment banks in Europe and has worked as a software developer for the National Center for Human Genome research, Microline Software, Neuron Data, and Electric Eye in Singapore. Selena is perhaps best-known for creating the Public Domain Web Script Archive (Extropia) and writing several books on Web Programming (Perl, CGI, Java).
Email: selena@extropia.com

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