Did you know you can send a SMS from HTML?

Week 204 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2021-09-20.

Turns out you can do a lot more than just send emails using the <a> tag in HTML. Even the mailto functionality can be fairly complex, letting you specify what to populate the To, CC, BCC, subject and body of an email with.

tel:

If you use the tel: prefix for a link, you can prompt the user to confirm they want to call a number. These tags are really useful on the websites of businesses in particular. Think of a restaurant, you want to call and make a booking or an order. The number is there and if it's clickable it's a little less friction between the user and the restaurant. Gone are the days of having to copy and paste (digitally or manually), now you can click and get going.

This example would attempt to call the number '07999999999', I prefixed the country code to avoid doubt but in reality you can specify it in whatever way makes the most sense to you.

sms:

The SMS protocol is quite similar to mailto: although support might vary depending on your OS. In theory you can specify multiple recipients and a body (like you can for emails) but iOS only supports the first number it encounters. If you specify a single recipient and a body, the body is appended to the number so it's best to keep it simple for the widest support.

This would initiate the compose window in your SMS client to the number '07999999999'.

Support for third party apps

There are also protocols for a whole range of apps, you can see a pretty good list at beradrian's blog. Support will depend on your OS and the apps you have installed.

Tags: development, html