Last updated Wednesday, Nov 28, 2007

Web Standards in Email Clients

Fed up of writing Web 0.1 HTML for emails? You are not alone. Join the campaign to sort out standards support in HTML clients.

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Back to the Old Skool

If you’ve ever coded an HTML email you’ll be aware that you have to throw all the things you learned at Web Standards school out of the window. Forget the following:

CSS Support
Tableless layout
Keeping styles out of your markup

No really it is true. To get things working in email clients and various webmail clients you’ll need to:

Use tables
Use inline font tags and go inline with your styles
Apply horrible styles to pretty much every tag in your markup

This is the end of 2007 remember.

Someone cares

We’ve come along way with Web Standards. Microsoft listened to the community and have brought IE7 pretty much up to speed. Thank you Microsoft. But have they sorted out their email client? No they haven’t. Outlook uses the Word engine. Not even a browser engine. Microsoft are not alone though. Google falls flat on its face in Gmail and Lotus Notes is very poor. Who cares? Email Standards cares

Who’s doing this

The very people who created Campaign Monitor. HTML email is their business so it is no surprise it should be someone like them. But at last someone is standing up and shouting about something that is way behind. The blog looks like it will be a great resource for developers as well as continuing to put pressure on software and application developers to support standards.

What needs to happen

The web community care about this. It is time that email client developers also care. The current email of Shame is:

Apple .Mac (really Apple!?)
Google Gmail (pleeease please Google)
Lotus Notes 8 (where is the standards love?)
Microsoft Outlook 2007 (what? on the list again?)
Windows Live Hotmail (look MS - you have two chances for redemption!)

This is not finger pointing. Email clients are way way behind. I’m really pleased the standards community has a voice for this campaign. I for one will miss the Old Skool HTML but I won’t mourn it’s passing.

Get involved

Developers! Email Client Application Developers! Get involved! Let’s get standards support across email clients. We’re almost there in browsers. We can do it in email clients!

Put some pressure on. Blog about it. Talk about it. Find out more at Email Standards.

Have an update or suggestion for this article? You can edit it here and send me a pull request.