HTML Emails and The Suckers Who Code Them
You’d figure with all the advancements in “web browsing technology”, someone along the line would have said “Hey, lets port over some of that functionality to email!” No, of course they wouldn’t. That would have made my life far, far too easy. Which says a lot considering it was just a few years go I was damning HTML emails.
You know that client I spoke of a week back? Well, they asked me to put together a new marketing email for them in line with past campaigns. I’ll admit, it’s been a very long time since I’ve put one together, but I figured since most clients that can render them are powered by the IE core (i.e. Outlook/Outlook Express), this wouldn’t be an issue. So I did what I normally do; pop open Dreamweaver, put together some sexy xhtml/css and test it in Firefox and IE. Things were looking great! That is, until I opted to test it out in Outlook. The client butchered the email. So I figured up Thunderbird hoping for better results. Wrong again. Even worse, Gmail failed to render anything and Hotmail turned it into the bastard child of an old Geocities site. So no only did I have to ax most of the divs, but all the CSS had to be inline. This left me with the one option I’ve not used for any design elements in more than 3 years: Tables.
What a pain in the ass. I basically had to relearn all of the bad habits I kicked years ago. So where’s the outrage? In all my “research”, I’ve not once found any of the “standards nazis” calling for HTML email reform. Why not? Sure, it’s annoying and people like myself have our email clients configured to prevent these things from loading, but it’s the one medium that’s even more global than web pages and we’re still using outdated and ugly ways to deliver data. What gives?
RSS 2.0
I know the feeling man. I’m the only web guy for my company and our mailing list has some 300,000 members to it. Every time management askes me to send out another html email, I get a flood of complaints about how something didn’t work in their client. If this were a page on our site, I’d totally understand the complaints, but when you’re dealing with just thousands and thousands of different clients, there’s not way you’re going to get everyone perfectly. So I try to ignore these people, but management expects me to fix the internet. So I feel your pain, brah.
Actually, I have a correction to that post. I last used tables for design in the first half of 2004. While I was at AMG, I was forced into using tables for the majority of pages because of the IE-centric view the company had at the time. After lots of pushing on the subject, I finally managed to talk them into letting me convert pages to valid xhtml as a cost cutting move. It wasn’t long after that, however, I was told to pack my bags. That’s why the front page and static pages are table free, but things like the artist and album pages are still nested table hell.
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