Andrew said:
It configured in an odd way such as to lesson the amount#
of it's utility - OK?
If Randy's description of his e-mail system is accurate (and there is no
reason to believe otherwise) then configuring a mail client to work with
his browses would be futile and deliver no additional utility.
OK, it's been reliable for me (and many others) from
countless websites for years. Better?
Given the extensive list of what you are dismissing as "odd" and
"misconfigured" systems in which mailto: will certainly not work you are
defining reliable as; works for an unquantifiable subset of internet
users.
And blaming the users for whom it doesn't work for causing their own
problems. An attitude that is not dissimilar form blaming the user for
not using a default configuration of a recent version of IE on a Windows
desktop computer when they cannot access an IE only web site. The next
stage in that argument is usually to start fabricating and throwing
around statistics that imply that some "normal" majority represents a
sufficiently large percentage of the potential users that the residue
can be disregarded out of hand.
The client (the person who wants, and is probably paying for, a web
site) probably would prefer a definition of reliable that was more like;
works for 100% of the people 100% or the time. The combination of forms
and server-side scripting comes closer to that then any alternative (by
a long way). But if the client employs a developer who doesn't want to
do the work (or doesn't have the skills) they may be bamboozled into
accepting mailto:, and never be any the wiser because one of the
features of unreliable internet authoring is that you don't often get to
hear from the people for whom it is unreliable (especially when the
unreliability is in the communication/feed-back system). They go
elsewhere and do their business with the implementers of the reliable
alternatives.
My head is definitely not in the sand.
Some other not-so-well-lit location?
No survey's necessary here dude.
I am frequently remedied of the developer posing to this group who said
"I use pop-up windows extensively and I have never had any complaints
about them", who's feedback page was in a pop-up window.
I am also reminded of rather odd little (vanity published) book called
"Does the Earth Rotate?" (published 1919 [1]) by a (English) westcounty
fruitcake and religious zealot called William Edgell, in which he
attempts to argue that the world is flat and the heavens fixed above it.
Mr Edgell come to this (unexpected, even in 1919) conclusion through
prolonged observation of the poll star. Fixing a narrow rigid tube that
pointed at the poll star to a framework in his garden he sat, night
after night, staring down this tube, observing that the poll star
remained completely stationary in the heavens and making extensive
records of his observations.
Eventually concluding that the only reasonable explanation for the fixed
position of the poll star could only be a fixed, flat earth under a
fixed heaven, with the sun and moon being the only bodies to ever move.
Eventually publishing his book to challenge the scientific and education
orthodoxy of the time. And challenging anyone interested to set
themselves up a similar tube and observe the fixedness of the poll star
for themselves. (The sections of the book where he stubbornly
misinterprets every alternative explanation are quite amusing, but too
time consuming to go into).
The irony of this being that while Mr Edgell stared down his tube at the
one fixed(ish) point in the sky he was blinkered to the rest of the
universe, arching around the poll star at a steady 15 degrees an hour.
Richard.
[1] This book came to light in the library of the then (1919) Radstock
village school teacher, inherited by a friend of mine (his grandson). A
library that also included the 1919 first English edition of Einstein's
"Special and General Theory of Relatively".