Re: 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. -- http://www.interjinn.com Application and Templating Framework for PHP