Changing The World (of Email)
November 29, 2007 at 9:14 am
The Email Standards Project launched yesterday with the goal of working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients. Read more about it here.
I think it’s a great idea. It’s crazy the way things are currently. CSS has enabled web designers to do many wonderful and beautiful things, and we regularly enjoy the fruits of the meshing of creativity and responsive code on websites. Sadly, though, email design is being locked into the way things were back in 1999. The many email clients that are in use all render css in different ways, with the result that you cannot be sure how your beautiful design will look once it’s delivered. Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and even Apple .Mac kill css designs and make them look shocking. So, when we’re creating email templates, we’ve got to go back to inline styling for each and every element – ie. using tables and formatting each header, sub header, that you see. Apart from being tedious and time consuming, it’s also ugly code. And increasingly, it’s getting hard to find good non-css coders who are willing to work in tables again!
So what can we do to support the Email Standards Project? Well the ultimate goal is to work with the makers of the email clients and get them to adopt some core standards. If you know anyone who works for any of the big email client developers, then please tell them about the Email Standards Project – send them this link: http://www.email-standards.org.
Comments (2 responses)
I think it’s great to finally have some big guys pushing behind this rather than taking the snobbish and impractical “emails should be text-only” approach. The good news is that there’s now a generation of designers (like myself) who started out doing css-stuff, so hopefully we’ve reached a tipping point and these email clients will start to respond. Gosh, even if they do so just to compete with Apple Mail, that’d be a good thing.
That’s right Kevin – it’s thanks to the “Kids” that things are finally getting done! Partly because they don’t know old style non-css and partly because you/they don’t accept the text only answer. And rightly so!
Me – I can’t wait til the much talked about first generation of truly wired kids reaches the workforce – which should be in the next couple of years. IT departments who have maintained a stranglehold on what can be downloaded and accessed will be seriously challenged.
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