The Email Standards Project
The use of standards in email design have long been neglected. Well, neglected isn’t the best word. I mean unsupported. If you haven’t worked with HTML emails, it might be a surprise to you that support amongst the clients is something akin to the wild west. In this day in age, I find that confounding. By now, must of us have thrown our old ways of nesting tables out the window and fully embraced CSS. Email Standards Project to the rescue.
Over the past few years, I’ve been writing valid XHTML and CSS for my projects. I fully appreciate all of the benefits that web standards have brought to the table. When designing emails, I feel like I’m stepping into the late 90’s where tables for layout were all the rage. And I say that without <blink>-ing. Today’s email clients have such poor support for positioning and floats that tables are the only the only viable option for layout. The Email Standards Project has taken the measure to create an acid test influenced by the one used by WaSP. The results are eye-opening.
The Email Standards Project is the product of Mathew Patterson from Campaign Monitor. Their blog provides a wealth of useful email-related information. I highly recommend checking it out. That being said, this initiative has garnered my full support.
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