Tag Archives: outlook

Who’s Afraid of HTML Email?

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Anyone who tells you creating HTML email is easy has either never done it, or is lying. Inexperienced designers tend to think, “Oh, no problem, it’s all tables and font tags!” Grizzled veterans, however, know all too well the difficulties of getting anything but the most simple design to render well in a variety of clients.

Email design today is like web design in the early 90′s, complete with nested tables, spacer gifs, and FONT tags galore. Standards support is virtually non-existent, and even simple things like background images and table spacing are handled poorly by some clients.

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The Email Standards Project

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In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind.

This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards in email clients.

The Email Standards Project is about 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.

Our mission is to drive the use and support of web standards in email, working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for designers and readers, and we’d love your help.

Given Microsoft’s recent slide backwards on this front in Outlook 2007, the need for a group like this has never been higher. Let’s hope they’re able to get the kind of results the Web Standards Project eventually got.

Villagers Need Flowers

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Sorry for such a long delay in posting, but I just bought a copy of Black and White, so I’ve been playing pretty much non-stop. I felt guilty for not posting much, so here’s several various tidbits.

  • I would like to repeat, once again, my undying love for annna from Things I Hate. This article has only strengthened my feelings.
  • I sat down at my friend Urn’s work computer and found this note taped to the monitor: “Urn- Some woman called and said something- could have been about you, or someone else, or something like that. Call her back. I think her number was 1-900-something, but I can’t remember. -Colin”
  • Netscape sucks. I feel bad saying this, since up until a year ago, I was a strong supporter of the “Netscape is better than Microsoft” mentality… Until Netscape proved me wrong. IE is faster and more stable (on my system) than Netscape 4.7, and WAY more stable than Netscape 6, which is awful. This is old news, though. What’s new to me is that I recently discovered that Outlook Express is better than Netscape’s mail client! I put it on Annie’s computer in desperation to find something that would crash her computer less than Netscape Mail. Outlook not only loads faster and crashes less, it was WAY easier to set up. The configuration just make more sense.
  • In Black and White, the villagers express their needs to you by raising little flags around the village store. These flags have little icons on them to tell you what they mean. Little pictures of grain mean they need food, the little heart means they need to breed, and the little tree means they need wood. So I was walking around campus in a bit of a daze, and I saw this banner they have hanging from all the light posts, which just has an image of a flower on it. My first reaction: VILLAGERS NEED FLOWERS.
  • A few years ago a coworker of mine from Egghead set up a website called the Psychic Dog Network. In a freakish coincidence, Jill just gave me a link to the amazingly similar, but wholly separate Psychic Puppy Network.
  • Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus!
  • Oh, and also, Annie and I may be moving back to Portland in mid-June instead of late July. More on that as we get details firmed up.