Email Standards Project: Thank you for existing
From Apple's shiny promotional material to MoveOn's minimalist calls to action, we receive and respond to HTML email every day. If you look beyond the surface to the code, you'll see that HTML email is in much the same place that the web was back in 2000. The markup is primitive and the wide range of email clients makes it nearly impossible to achieve accessibility and consistency.
If you've had to code an HTML email you know what I'm talking about. This is the only medium in which I still use the old methods that abuse semantic markup for presentation purposes. Inline styles are de rigueur to make those table tags come out right [shudder].
Fortunately, a new groups has emerged to raise awareness of the problem. The Email Standards Project has a simple goal:
[T]o help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently.
Following in the footsteps of the successful Web Standards Project, this new group's aim is both simple and ambitious.
To give you a sense of how bad the current state of affairs actually is, I suggest looking at their reports on how the most popular email clients respond to the acid test.
So here's to the success of the Email Standards Project. We are not living in a world where the current version of MS Internet Explorer actually support web standards, let's hope that we can do as well with email.
In the meantime, I highly recommend MailBuild for all your HTML email needs. My clients love it and their templates provide a great foundation for learning the voodoo of HTML for email.
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Who is this guy?
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