RE: identified focus areas

Hi,

Html email is 80% of my coding time.

I totally agree with Remi, Word rendering engine is the main problem.
I might help with tricks for most webmails and mailing softwares (except old versions of Lotus which are absolutely awful ^^...).
I'm also working with responsive emails, and we're pushing video emails using html5 and flash/gifs callbacks at the moment.
It's working on Android/Ios/Mac Os native email clients (still a few problems with Samsung devices), and on Outlook.com, there's still much work to do, but it would also be a good subject regarding evolutions.

The main idea is to manage good degradation in HTML emails,  as their  renderings are modified by devices, softwares/browsers and OS, otherwise we'll really be stuck in the "dark age" Rémi was talking about for ages (thanks to MS once again).

I'll contact every frontend-dev I know about this group.

Have a nice day everyone,
Stéphane Leroy
Front-end Developper / HTML Trainer
Experian Marketing Services
Experian France
Centre Europe Azur
323 Boulevard du Président Hoover
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T. : 33 (0) 3 20 68 56 26 l Fax: 33 (0) 3 20 68 88 41
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De : Rémi (HTeuMeuLeu) [mailto:remi@hteumeuleu.fr]
Envoyé : jeudi 30 janvier 2014 13:17
À : public-htmail@w3.org
Objet : Re: identified focus areas

Hello,

This is my first participation in a W3C community group. And as a front-end developer, I think I can bring some help regarding this topic that have caused, and still causes me many headaches. I'm not exactly sure how to start the conversation here, so I'll start with this little rant.

HTML e-mail coding is the nemesis of most front-end developers and webdesigners. I, on the contrary, have this extraordinary ability to tolerate it, and even sometimes enjoy the mess that is HTML e-mail coding. HTML e-mails are a very important marketing and branding tool, even in this age of social networks. Yet, it seems like it is stuck in a dark age, like web development used to be more than ten years ago, before CSS became widely adopted. The biggest point of concern that come to my mind  is CSS support .

CSS support is hazardous. Except from basic text based properties (font-size, font-family, etc.), other properties tend not to have a wide enough support to safely code complex layouts. And sometimes, webmails can unpredictably remove support for some properties for no apparent reason. For example, in january 2013, Outlook.com stopped supporting the margin property (http://www.emailonacid.com/blog/details/C13/emailology_outlook_marginalizing_css_properties), stripping it from the code before being displayed in the webmail. This means that we still need to rely heavily on tables for layout, which in turns become a headache for responsive e-mails. Campaign Monitor has a good overview of support in email software and webmails (http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/).

The proprietary nature of webmails and most mail software also tends to be a big problem, because it leads to difficulty for testing, and for understanding some terrible bugs. For example, Outlook 2007, 2010 and 2013 use Word HTML rendering engine, which cause to create "page breaks" every 1790px, which can completely break a layout (http://www.emailonacid.com/blog/details/C13/horizontal_spacing_issues_in_outlook_2007_and_2010).

My expectations from this working group is to understand why webmails or mail software have such a bad support for web rendering, and to help make the situation evolve. This is clearly a lengthy project, just like the advocacy for CSS usage in the early 2000. Such a project was already started in 2007 (http://www.email-standards.org/), but with fewer expectations, and abandonned since 2010. But it needs to be done at some point, or we'll be stuck in this dark age of HTML emails forever.

Rémi



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