Ashley Sheridan wrote:
On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 13:44 -0500, Robert Cummings wrote:
What about signing yourself up to some newsletters to see how they do
it?
Looking at the ones I get from Facebook as an example, they use the
boundary codes you mentioned, and I can't see anything particularly
special that's been added. What order are you sending the two message
parts by the way? I think the traditional way is to send the plain/text
part first, so that UA's that don't understand or support multipart
messages only use the first one. As you mentioned that you're seeing
HTML code at the top, I'd hazard a guess that you're sending the HTML
first?
The problem is most likely NOT his email structure, but the fact that
Microsoft in all their lock-in, make things difficult, non standard,
monopolistic philosophy chose to switch out the IE HTML renderer (which
was getting pretty decent with IE7 and IE8) with the Office HTML
renderer... so now basic things like CSS padding of something as simple
as a <p> tag is not possible. You now need to use margins instead. The
full list of supported attributes / CSS can be found here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx
Obviously creating HTML emails was getting too easy (like it is with
Thunderbird). Of course... I guess it could be as bad as Google
stripping out the stylesheets entirely when viewing HTML content which
forces you to put the styles on the tags themselves.
... actually I'm not sure what's worse... at least you can use standard
styles with Google's gmail. Either way... making nice looking HTML
emails that work across Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail
is a pain in the ass.
Cheers,
Rob.
If he's getting HTML output at the top of the email, I would think that
did suggest that MS Word didn't like the structure. Making HTML emails
is now such a difficult job, as the email clients rendering engines tend
to not get updated as often as browsers, and there doesn't seem to be
any effort in bringing the rendering of the email clients together.
Whenever I create these emails I try to make sure I try no to get too
creative in the design, and use not only CSS styles, but properties of
the HTML tags themselves. It means I end up writing the CSS essentially
twice and backing it up with old deprecated HTML attributes, but it
usually does the trick.
Is there any effort by some standards group that email clients could
benefit from?
I think I skipped over some relevant information in the original post :)
Still... as you've said... email HTML sucks... and MS made it worse.
Cheers,
Rob.
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