What are no CGI Forms and how do they work?

No CGI Forms use the customer's Mail Application to send in the information from an Online Form. Also called "mailto forms", they have an action similar to this:

ACTION="mailto:frank@sislands.com?subject=JavaScript"

Problems:

• Assuming that the customer is on her or his computer:
  As long as the client has everything set up correctly, this strategy works great.
  It takes all the information from the Form and dumps it into the body of the email.

• Assuming that the customer is not on her or his computer:
  1) The Mail Application might not be setup.
  2) If the Mail Application is setup - The information doesn't match the customer.

Forms and CGI and How it Work?

For the purposes of our discussion here, server-side "scripts" are triggered when they receive Form input from a web page. All the processing is done on the server as opposed to JavaScript which is entirely a client-side language. Right now you can probably see one blaring advantage of server-side languages over client-side languages. Server-side languages do not have to take into account running on the Heinz 57 varieties of browsers that are available. Once the "script" is set up on your server, it is there for good.

Which is better: mailto Forms or CGI?

Clearly CGI is the way to go as long as you have CGI privileges.