November 29, 2007 – 10:12 pm
So I just read (thanks to a link from Jason’s del.icio.us feed) an interesting reversal of position on Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog on the subject of HTML e-mail. It references the Email Standards Project.
It’s an interesting approach, and probably the best way to handle the issue, but I still would recommend avoiding it at all costs, if it’s at all up to you.
The reason (primarily) is that at this time most e-mail clients are still very lacking in “real” support for standards-compliant HTML and CSS. If you stick within the limited scope of the common ground, it’s OK, I guess, but the problem inevitably becomes maintaining that stand, once you’ve agreed to do HTML main in the first place.
This stems from the fact that it’s usually the marketing geniuses who insist on the fancy presentation that requires HTML in the first place. The problem is that once you’re doing HTML at all, they know that you can make it look more like they want it to look, and they don’t care that you would need to resort to all kinds of non-standards-compliant table-based hackery in order to achieve that look consistently, due to the lack of consistent support in the various clients.
Yes, this is the slippery slope argument, and I guess you could just as easily argue that the only realistic way to tackle this problem is to work towards compliance in the major e-mail clients and embrace the ones that do offer it.
I just can’t help but not like the idea of HTML e-mail in the first place. We already have a perfectly good delivery platform for HTML: it’s called a web page. Last time I checked, almost all e-mail clients will convert a plain-text URL into a click-able link, so I say keep the e-mails themselves plain text, short and sweet, with a link to a web page for the full HTML content of what you’re trying to present.
Man do I hate IE.
You’d think that creating a radio button in javascript would be as easy as something like this:
var radioButton = document.createElement('input');
radioButton.id = ‘RadioButtonList_1′;
radioButton.name = ‘RadioButtonList’;
radioButton.type = ‘radio’;
parentElement.appendChild(radioButton);
but, no - that doesn’t work, thanks to IE not allowing the name attribute to be set for dynamically created elements.
So, instead, you need to do something like this:
var radioButton;
try {
// This is the only way you can set the “name” attribute in IE, but it will fail in other browsers
radioButton = document.createElement(’<input id=”RadioButtonList_1″ name=”RadioButtonList” type=”radio” />’);
} catch() {
// The above will fail if not in IE, so try it the correct way here
radioButton = document.createElement(’input’);
radioButton.id = ‘RadioButtonList_1′;
radioButton.name = ‘RadioButtonList’;
radioButton.type = ‘radio’;
}
With the recent discussion of CSS style rules and quirks, I thought I’d mention one of my favorite CSS features that I’ve been making a lot of use of recently: multiple class selectors.
This is one CSS2 addition that isn’t mentioned much in CSS books (at least that I’ve seen), although most recent browsers do support it - all the “good” ones and IE, too. 
According to the specification, you can apply multiple class attributes to any element, separated by spaces, such as:
<h1 class="title special">Test</h1>, which is useful, because then you can have separate rule definitions for title and special which you can share with any other elements on the page. If you think about it, this can serve to dramatically reduce duplication in your style sheets.
In addition, you can specify rules that only apply to elements where both classes are specified, for further control & flexibility.
So, for example, here is some code that demonstrates this: Read More »
I was just thinking about this brief exchange over on Dan’s blog, as well as some recent stuff I’ve been dealing with at work, and realizing that the endless stream of Internet Explorer security vulnerabilities is actually a tremendous blessing to us web developers.
Here’s why: While IE6’s implementation of web standards is still woefully inadequate, it’s certainly miles ahead of their 5.x versions, and I don’t even want to talk about any versions before that. Thankfully, the severity of the flaws in these earlier versions has basically made it a requirement for every Windows user to keep automatic updates on, and always get the latest patches and upgrades to IE. No one in their right mind would run a Windows box without keeping up on the patches these days, just because there are so many exploits out there.
This has the pleasant side effect of web designers being able to safely limit their testing of their pages to IE6, since anyone running any earlier version of the browser would have much more serious problems than their page looking funny.
August 11, 2005 – 11:55 am
Research: Web Site’s Appearance Matters - By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer
Not surprisingly, male subjects tended to assign higher ratings to pages designed by men, and females preferred sites made by women. But the researchers said they gleaned important tidbits by looking more closely at the ratings.
Women seemed to like pages with more color in the background and typeface. Women also favored informal rather than posed pictures.
Men responded better to dark colors and straight, horizontal lines across a page. They also were more pleased by a three-dimensional look and images of “self-propelling” rather than stationary objects.
With those standards in mind, the researchers checked out the Web sites for 32 British universities and determined that 94 percent had a “masculine orientation.” Two percent showed a female-favored arrangement.
And the interesting question:
So should Web sites consider having two faces, one for male users and another for female visitors? Moss said more research is needed.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to start posting my bookmarks or anything, but I noticed I hadn’t done a tech post in a while, so I wanted to share this link to the CSS Zen Garden for any web people who somehow haven’t seen it yet, and remind everyone that all web devs who use tables for layout control should be fired.
Alternate title: Popup navigation is evil
Jared: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 16:29:40 -0700
I’m blogging it right now.
Dan: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 16:22:00 -0700
You should blog on this, I wouldn’t mind at all.
Here’s the full conversation, in the correct order:
Read More »
Here’s a good (up to date) browser capabilities chart, listing IE6, Firefox 1 and Opera 8.
See this Google blog entry, explaining that Google will instruct Firefox to download (”prefetch”) the best match in your search results before you click on it, so it will be there when you do.
See here for the technical details, if you’re interested in making your site faster on Mozilla-based browsers.
IE6 is the new Netscape 4.7x - by Jeff Atwood
It’s like we woke up one day, and IE6 had transformed overnight into the browser that we all wish would go away. The one that’s a pain in the ass to support. The source of all those unfortunate CSS hacks and JavaScript if..then blocks. The browser with all the oh-so-clever derogatory names you get when the crowd has turned on you. And it was so .. sudden. Somehow the IE7 announcement, which should be a glimmer of hope– remember, we were told there would be no new development of Internet Explorer whatsoever until the next major version of Windows (Longhorn) was released– is, paradoxically, making the situation worse.
I really hope the IE7 team can pull circa-2001 IE6 out of the accelerating death spiral that it seems to be mired in. I guess that’s what you get when you inexplicably stop development for more than three years on a product that is integral to the user experience of millions of users on a daily basis. That’s possibly the ultimate WTF.