Yours faithfully
Any web designer who has ever touched a HTML newsletter will have experienced the frustration of seeing their carefully crafted design mangled in different email clients. Gmail and Outlook 2007 in particular are very good at showing ‘unexpected results’.
It takes me back to the days of Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape 4, when it used to take almost as much trickery to get it right in those browsers as it does to get a newsletter to look right in most popular email clients today.
In 1998, the Web Standards Project, co-founded by Jeffrey Zeldman, started working with browser companies and HTML editor vendors to get the standards established by the World Wide Web Consortium implemented.
The efforts of the WaSP have made websites easier to use, faster to implement, faster to download and more search engine friendly (and made the lives of web designers much easier).
Sadly email clients didn’t follow suit.
It looks as though change is on the horizon; last Tuesday (27 November) the Email Standards Project was launched.
Its aims are twofold: to make designers understand why standards are as important for email as they are for the web as well as to work with email client developers to ensure consistent rendering of HTML email.
We look forward to seeing the results and can’t wait for newsletter development to be a more pleasant experience. Who knows, my hair might even grow back.
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