Re: [PHP] HTML & plain text in Outlook 2007

Ashley Sheridan wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 13:44 -0500, Robert Cummings wrote:
>>>
>>> What about signing yourself up to some newsletters to see how they do
>>> it?
>>>
>>> Looking at the ones I get from Facebook as an example, they use the
>>> boundary codes you mentioned, and I can't see anything particularly
>>> special that's been added. What order are you sending the two message
>>> parts by the way? I think the traditional way is to send the plain/text
>>> part first, so that UA's that don't understand or support multipart
>>> messages only use the first one. As you mentioned that you're seeing
>>> HTML code at the top, I'd hazard a guess that you're sending the HTML
>>> first?
>> The problem is most likely NOT his email structure, but the fact that 
>> Microsoft in all their lock-in, make things difficult, non standard, 
>> monopolistic philosophy chose to switch out the IE HTML renderer (which 
>> was getting pretty decent with IE7 and IE8) with the Office HTML 
>> renderer... so now basic things like CSS padding of something as simple 
>> as a <p> tag is not possible. You now need to use margins instead. The 
>> full list of supported attributes / CSS can be found here:
>>
>>      http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx
>>
>> Obviously creating HTML emails was getting too easy (like it is with 
>> Thunderbird). Of course... I guess it could be as bad as Google 
>> stripping out the stylesheets entirely when viewing HTML content which 
>> forces you to put the styles on the tags themselves.
>>
>> ... actually I'm not sure what's worse... at least you can use standard 
>> styles with Google's gmail. Either way... making nice looking HTML 
>> emails that work across Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail 
>> is a pain in the ass.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Rob.
>
> 
> If he's getting HTML output at the top of the email, I would think that
> did suggest that MS Word didn't like the structure. Making HTML emails
> is now such a difficult job, as the email clients rendering engines tend
> to not get updated as often as browsers, and there doesn't seem to be
> any effort in bringing the rendering of the email clients together.
> 
> Whenever I create these emails I try to make sure I try no to get too
> creative in the design, and use not only CSS styles, but properties of
> the HTML tags themselves. It means I end up writing the CSS essentially
> twice and backing it up with old deprecated HTML attributes, but it
> usually does the trick.
> 
> Is there any effort by some standards group that email clients could
> benefit from?

I think I skipped over some relevant information in the original post :)

Still... as you've said... email HTML sucks... and MS made it worse.

Cheers,
Rob.
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