HTML Email: State of emergency
There are a few really cruddy projects in my profession and one of them is developing an HTML email template. Email templates are one of those things that every client wants and usually they want more flexibility with an email template than what they do with their website template.
Unfortunately for us developers, CSS support in email clients is horrendous… I’m not talking IE6 horrendous; I’m talking like pre-history, not even close to web browser horrendous! As always, the main culprit for pitiful CSS-rendering is Microsoft.
During the development of Office 2007 a very intelligent [read: brainless] marketing person (I assume) had the hair-brained idea to put the Word rendering engine into Outlook to render emails. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that Word is not the right tool for the job.
The other surprising culprit is Google… Yes, you read that right. Gmail (Google’s online mail app) has terrible CSS support and the only way to render half-descent looking emails is using deprecated stylised HTML elements (like the <font> tag).
The fantastic crew at Campaign Monitor put together a very comprehensive run-down of CSS support in the most popular mail clients; which was recently updated. To read through this report is fairly disheartening as a developer, considering that you (we) should try and develop for the lowest common denominator.
A number of years ago, Jeffrey Zeldman started a revolution in the web industry, spearheading the standards movement and bringing about a big wake-up call for certain overly popular software companies.
Well, it’s quite possible that this has started again. Except that this time it’s specific to Email clients. David Greiner from Campaign Monitor put together a very compelling little blog-post two days ago, which seems to be making a few small ripples in the web-industry. Hopefully, these ripples will turn into waves and eventually poor down a tsunami on the people who really need to hear it.
I’m looking at you Microsoft!
September 12th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Thanks for the link and backup James. We are hoping for a wave to bring some change in with it!
To be fair to Gmail, you can use inline CSS with it, and that will work. It is the CSS in the head which it completely strips out.