(soapbox alert) For the first time in many months, I just now generated a couple of new Web pages (descendancy and ascendancy charts) and uploaded them to my ISP's Web server. This was with FO 10.0. All went well. But in checking out the new Web pages after uploading them, I was reminded of an old complaint I have about HTML, and the HTML generated by FO *optionally* can have this problem if you so choose. You can optionally tell FO to include a mailing address and/or an E-mail address. If you include an E-mail address, FO sets up an HTML mailto tag to enable a user who is browsing your page to contact you conveniently via E-mail with one click E-mailing. And when I made my new Web pages just now, I included the E-mail address option. Sounds pretty neat! What could be better than one click E-mailing? Actually, I think it's terrible. I think this all goes back to 1981 or 1982 when IBM introduced the personal computer, with emphasis in "personal". Ever since then, many software designers have implicitly assumed that their software would be used on a "personal" computer, meaning a computer which is used by just one person, and where that person doesn't use any other computer. So they were assuming a one-to-one relationship between users of "personal" computers and the "personal" computers themselves. In reality, in many cases the relationship is many-to-many rather than one-to-one. For example, I regularly use three PC's (one to many). Fortunately, only one of the three is regularly shared (with my kids, as it turns out), which is a many-to-one relationship. What does that have to do with the mailto tag and one click E-mailing? Well, just about everything. Microsoft is one of the worst offenders in the "assume one-to-one" game. DOS was terrible in this regard, as was Windows 3.1. Windows/95 and Windows/98 were only slightly better. Windows/2000 and Windows/XP are starting to get a lot better, but we've got a ways to go. Here's the practical implications of this. Windows supports an interface called MAPI which programs can use to send E-mail. But MAPI assumes that you have set up an E-mail account with an E-mail address and a server that it can use. Suppose I do so, and then one of my kids uses the machine, goes to a Web page, and clicks on "Send me mail" or "contact me" or some such. There will be a mailto tag in the HTML, the browser will use MAPI to send an E-mail, and the E-mail will look like it came from me rather than from my kids. This is a Bad Thing. Conversely, suppose somebody in a computer lab in a school, or somebody on a computer in a public library, or some other public place, browses to a Web page, clicks on "Send me mail" or "contact me" or some such. It either will not work because an E-mail account that MAPI can use has not been set up (this is bad), or it will work because somebody (possibly a previous user of the same machine) has set up an account and you will be using their E-mail account (this is even worse). The fundamental underlying problem is that Microsoft in implementing MAPI is implicitly assuming a one-to-one relationship between users and machines. I don't know as much about the details of the mailto tag if a user is browsing a Web page on a UNIX machine or on a Mac, but it's the same basic problem. Everything is probably fine if the usage of the machine is one-to-one between the user of the machine and the machine itself. But if the usage of the machine is one-to-many or many-to-one or many-to-many, various disasters can befall. When I first started implementing my own Web pages, I used the mailto tag without hesitation. But since I realized the problem, I have used the mailto tag very rarely. And when I do, I always make sure that the actual E-mail address appears in plain text so that the user can copy and paste it into their E-mail program if necessary. The convenient one click E-mail button provided on Web pages created by FO 10.0 does not display the E-mail address at all. My best recollection is that FO 9.x did display the E-mail address. What I did just now to make myself happy with my own FO 10.0 Web pages was to regenerate them without an E-mail address, so the convenient one click button with the mailto tag doesn't appear. I then put my E-mail address as plain text as an extra line on my (postal) mailing address. One more point about this dead horse, a lot of standard E-mail systems that people use (Outlook Express, etc.) will work with mailto tags, assuming an account has been set up, assuming you are not worried about your kids sending E-mail that looks like it comes from you, assuming you are not browsing in a public library, and all the other caveats above. But I can't think of a single case (I could be wrong about this) where a mailto tag will work with a Web based browser such as Hotmail or Yahoo or Juno or Webmail or anything like that. For example, if you click on a mailto tag the browser will not go to your Hotmail account for you to send the E-mail. I don't know if the mailto tag works on AOL (probably does) or on OWA (Outlook Web Access) which is Microsoft's implementation of a Web based E-mail that looks like Outlook (probably doesn't). So even if you ignore the many-to-many problem, mailto tags in HTML are not going to work for lots and lots of users. So I don't think this E-mail address feature of HTML which is generated by Family Origins is a very good thing, especially since it doesn't display the E-mail address. But it's not really the "fault" of Family Origins. Rather, the "fault" is that the underlying operating environment does not provide a reliable and secure way to assure that the mailto tag always works, and that it uses the correct E-mail account even in a many-to-many environment. (end of soapbox -- I am sure there will be contrary opinions) Jerry Bryan _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com