Fighting for email standards

by Grant McLachlan

As a designer, I am faced with web standards issues on a daily basis. From getting sites to render correctly, to tirelessly fiddling with code in HTML emails to get them to display perfectly. This is all due to web standards, or the lack thereof, across different browser platforms and email clients. Over the years there has been an increasing effort to develop browsers which comply with these web standards. (You can read more about web standards in Gavin’s post, Trying to sell web standards to the uninformed.)

The problem that needs to be addressed though, as far as standards go, is the fact that there is extremely little support for HTML based emails. This has in fact has gone backwards instead of progressing. Getting HTML to render correctly across different email clients is time consuming, frustrating and ultimately placing unnecessary costs on your clients.
I'm sure you all get emails almost on a daily basis that are an unreadable mess. This is because different mail clients (Outlook, Mac Mail, Gmail, Yahoo!, Entourage etc.) comply with different sets of standards.

Microsoft's release of Outlook 2007 was also a big knock to email standards - Outlook no longer uses Internet Explorer (that's an entire story on its own) to render HTML emails, but is instead using the inferior Microsoft Word rendering engine.

What does this mean you ask? It means that designers all over the world are being screwed by big corporations who seem to think that standards are not that important. 75-80% of people use Outlook, so 75-80% of people's HTML emails are going to look like a dog’s breakfast. Why would they do this? Who knows? This decision has said to have set standards back around 5 years. This is a very scary thought, especially when you consider how quickly the web has evolved in this time or even in the past year.

With that said, it's not all doom and gloom. The guys at Campaign Monitor have got together and are starting to do something about it. They have formed a group on Facebook called “The Email Standards Project” and on Wednesday they launched http://www.email-standards.org, a site dedicated to improving web standards for HTML emails. The Email Standards Project will be working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email clients.

2007/11/30 | permalink | comments (3) | trackbacks (0)

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