Email Standards Project Works to Improve Web Standards Support in Email Clients
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
Over the past few months, the fine folks at Campaign Monitor have been working on a new project to promote better support of CSS and web standards among major email clients (both offline and web-based programs). The new site for their Email Standards Project (ESP), has now launched and provides a range of helpful information for understanding to what degree various email clients support web standards.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, web standards is a general term for technical specs of website rendering that have been increasingly accepted in recent years. These guidelines, which focus a great deal of attention on support for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, which dictate the look and feel of web page), are designed to help developers of web browsers follow a standard set of protocols for how web pages are seen by users. Long story short, browsers (and websites) that are web-standards client render essentially the same for all users, regardless of their operating system, browser, etc.
Most browsers offer varying degrees of support for CSS and web standards. Among the most standards-compliant browsers are Firefox and Safari. Most lists of the least standards-compliant browsers are typically headed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE5 and IE6 are particularly unfriendly to CSS and web standards — IE7 offers improved support, but still lags behind Firefox, Safari and others).
As much variability exists among browsers, the current state of standards-support in email programs is even worse. What does this mean for the average business? If you send HTML-based emails (emails featuring graphics, different fonts, trackable web links, etc.) you’re taking a bit of a crap shoot as far as how that email will render based on how the recipient is viewing it. HTML email rendering varies greatly, even between different versions of the same program. For instance, Outlook 2003 offered significantly better CSS and standards-support than Outlook 2007. The same email opened in each of these email clients will look different. This variability also extends to web-based email clients (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live/Hotmail, .Mac Mail, and so on).
ESP has devised an acid test for comparing CSS and web standards support among email clients. This test outlines a limited sub-set of CSS tags and classes that would be most commonly used in HTML emails. The current results of these tests can be found on their website and are broken down by major email clients, including Outlook 2007, Apple Mail, Lotus Notes, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail and more.
By highlighting both the strengths and the shortcomings of popular email programs, ESP hopes to call attention to the need for standards support, as well as actively promote such change among software developers.
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