td stacking without using css - html

Our CRM allows us to send automatic emails to our customers using their software. Things like purchase receipts and so forth. While they offer HTML editing of the emails, it's heavily restricted and we may not use any CSS.
As far as what their style guide does allow, it appears to be all HTML and some inline styling, for example:
<span style="color:#ffffff">white</span>
<div style="color:#ffffff">
<img src="dickbutt.gif" style="width:30px;height:20px">
...are all OK according to the guide. However, no other CSS or CSS references are allowed, including:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/stylesheet.css" type="text/css">
or
<style type="text/css">
#import "/stylesheet.css";
</style>
or
<style type="text/css">
body { color:green; }
</style>
To add insult to injury, and I should have included this above, everything above the <body> tag (and including the body tag itself) is stripped out upon saving the file in their in-software HTML editor. They have some kind of auto-code modification scripts that reference the "approved" code in their style guide, and strips what's left. So what am I left with? Not much at all. Basically from between opening <table> to the closing </table>. They even strip out </body> and </html>.
With the remaining code, I'm unable to use #media at all or allow any <td> stacking. So, are their any alternate ways of linking to a style sheet you know about? ...a method that will allow stacking without access to CSS? I'm basically looking for a way to make these emails responsive under the restrictions outlined above.
I uploaded the style guide to JSfiddle: https://jsfiddle.net/Lxfqus7f

Yes, yes 100 times yes. Everyone who has ever designed an email template has had the same complaints. Email design is Web design circa 1999. First off just forget CSS references just inline everything you can and do not bother with #media tags, forget they even exist.
Table Design
Think of a <table> as a spreadsheet, a <tr> as a table row, and a <td> as a table cell. Instead of "stacking" TDs try nesting tables. A new table can go inside a TD and in a sort of Matryoshka doll style fashion you can make any layout you want.
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<table>
<tr>
<td>1</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>3</td>
<td>4</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
<td>5</td>
</tr>
</table>
The above works fine.
Responsive emails
The words responsive and email do not normally go together. What email clients render is severely limited but there are ways to work around it. Like setting your Master Table's width to 100% and having two TDs on each side. Like this:
<table width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr height="500px" valign="top">
<td width="*" bgcolor="#00FFFF"> </td>
<td width="550px" bgcolor="#FF0000"> <center><br><br> <H1>Body</h1> </center> </td>
<td width="*" bgcolor="#00FFFF"> </td>
</tr>
</table>
Here are both examples in a JSfiddle.
http://jsfiddle.net/e8r9ky4x/

Looks like your style guide includes the use of some inline styles:
<p>Our studio is <span style="color:purple">purple.</span></p>
Define sections of text that require different HTML <div>
<div style="color:#FC8301">
<h3>This title.</h3>
<p>This is sentence.</p>
</div>
Since you're automatically generating emails anyway, why not just let this one slide and declare your styles in variables and use them where appropriate?
Are they stripping out all style tags? Could you just put a style hidden at the begginning of a TD?
<td><style>/*rules are for quitters!*/</style>Stuff</td>

Using a style tag in the body may not be the best of things to use and may even induce vomiting in many web developers, but it IS a possibility to utilize in Email.
I would strongly recommend not to use it this way outside of cases like you have listed, and would recommend HEAVY testing across all clients as it can sometimes cause buggy results.
I would look to make your inline styling do most of the heavy lifting and just use the style tags in body for items that cannot be done any other way.
Below is some good resources on Responsive HTML email made to work on GMAIL APP (which strips the style tag almost completely) and should help give you a baseline on best way to create your emails.
Hybrid coding approach - http://labs.actionrocket.co/the-hybrid-coding-approach
Hybrid coding redux - http://labs.actionrocket.co/the-hybrid-coding-approach-2
Is Hybrid right option - http://labs.actionrocket.co/hybrid-is-the-answer-is-it-the-right-question

Related

How I place 3 links in the same line on HTML without using CSS

I need to put 3 links in the same line aligned like left, center, and right without using CSS.
Its something like this, I hope this helps
If you really want to do all of this without using any CSS, you can use tables.
<table>
<tr>
<td>First link</td>
<td>Second link</td>
<td>Third link</td>
</tr>
</table>
Otherwise you don't really have much of an option if you want the spacing and all you got on your image example. I would also not recommend using tables all that much, because pretty much everything should be responsive for mobile devices these days, and tables are really hard to fit in to a 320px of screen width.
This is extremely bad practice. A list of links is not tabular data. HTML is not a layout tool. This is how things were done in 1996. The web is better (in some ways) now and we do not do things this way now.
It is possible to hack a layout with a table and obsolete presentational attributes. The data is not tabular, however, so this is bad food for screen readers and search engines.
It is also not HTML 5. What you want to achieve is not possible with HTML 5. This is HTML 4.01 Transitional which, when it was released two decades ago, was only ever intended as a stop-gap while people converted over to using CSS for presentation.
<table width="100%">
<tr>
<td width="33%">A link</td>
<td width="34%" align=center>A link</td>
<td width="33%" align=right>A link</td>
</tr>
</table>
assuming you can add inline styling ,you can use this
<div>
<a href="" >firstlink</a>
<a href="" style ="text-align: center;
width: 90%;
display: inline-block;
margin: auto;">secondlink</a>
<a href="" >thirdlink</a>
</div>
else you can use one by answered by community wiki

Newsletter layout crashes with Gmail

I've actually created a template on Mailchimp. I used a basic template of Mailchimp and transformed it into the design they gave me. I used the the CSS inline tool of Mailchimp to insert all the code in an inline mode as Gmail does not accept any style on the header. I only have this issue on Gmail, the rest work perfectly. What can I do?
As the code is long I inserted it in a fiddle if you wish to check it out:
http://jsfiddle.net/z27Bw/
I need an answer as its a mystery for me!
You have 2 unclosed <td> tags in the HTML -- one on line 476, one on 482. That might be what's causing the issue in Gmail. If that doesn't fix it, I'd say yeah, it might be a colspan issue.
you can try this
Write first tr code like this
<tr>
<td colspan="2" height="281"> </td>
</tr>
instead of
<tr>
<td width="35" height="281"> </td>
<td class="headerContent"> </td>
</tr
>
and then put that big header image inside it.

Easy way to apply calculated/inline styles to html?

Really annoying situation, and maybe there is an easier solution.. but I basically have a simple table I have styled in the general format:
<style type="text/css">
table.master_table {
... global table styling
}
.master_table td {
... master table td styling
}
.master_table td.dv {
... td dv style
}
.. more styling
</style>
<table class="master_table">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="dv">
.. nothing special
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Now the problem is the server doesn't support the "style" element so I need to manually apply the style to each level i.e.:
<table style="... global table styling">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="td styling;td dv style">
.. nothing special
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Is there any programs that can do this? Or is there any easier way to do this? I basically have a Wordpress.com blog that looks beautiful, in Live Writer because of some custom styling but as soon as I post, it strips out the style block. As a test I went through an manually did some of the above and it works, its just insanely painful and error prone.
if you are on wordpress.com i do not think you can control the css or anyother file.
you have to host your own wordpress.org blog to customize your theme.
So I found an online solution called "emogrifier"
Works well, all you have to do is enter css, then enter html and it will output inline styles.
There is a plugin called Art Direction which lets you add custom css on a per post basis. If you use this style on several different pages you should add the styles to a global stylesheet.

Controls not aligning properly

I am using following code to design my home page. The output (as shown below) is not appearing properly. You can see the banner going to far left and the navigation links have a huge gap in between. How to set this? Can it be done using only the DIV tag instead of TABLE?
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>
First Website
</title>
</head>
<body>
<table id="main" align="center" width="600 px">
<tr id="trBanner">
<td id="tdBanner">
<img src="../../../My Pictures/banner copy.bmp.jpg"
</td>
</tr>
<tr id="trNavLinks">
<td id="lnkHome">
Home
</td>
<td id="lnkLife">
Life
</td>
<td id="lnkTeachings">
Teachings
</td>
<td id="lnkExperiences">
Experiences
</td>
<td id="lnkPhotoGallery">
Photo Gallery
</td>
<td id="lnkReach">
How to Reach
</td>
<td id="lnkContact">
Contact Us
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
alt text http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/b122c4ef21.jpg
Without seeing your code very long - don't use tables!
I know it's hard for those people who developed a long time with tables in webdesign, but belive me - after you learned how to design it with CSS & DIV-Tags, you will thank god for this!
Here is a tutorial for you: http://www.colorplexstudios.com/articles/div_web_design_tutorial/
And if you want to have an answer to your code-question:
It's because you have 1 cell in the first row and 3 cells in the second row. Use the colspan-attribute. You find a tutorial for this here: http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/tables/index_famsupp_30.html
Don't use tables, use a right combination of div tags and position attributes. They're way better than tables, and more editable if you need to make any changes.
Eek, remove the tables. Use a UL instead, with display: inline on it in the CSS. Then adjust it to your liking (margin, padding). Put that inside of a div, and position it in your page.
As others have recommended, tables are not the most appropriate element for your site's layout. However, the simple fix is:
<td id="tdBanner" colspan="7">
This will make your banner span the entire width of your table. On a side note, the ids on a page should be unique, so if you need to give an id to your td tags, they should be different than the a tags.
I would check out some of the CSS tutorials that others have linked to.

Stacked images in HTML email template have a space between them

I'm building a template for an HTML email I'll being sending via .NET. I don't do this often and I know I have to stick to tables and inline CSS. I just sliced up some images and I have two that need to stack. I understand there are issues with this in terms of whitespace in the HTML code. As a result, I've tried it all on one line, e.g.
<td valign="top" style="width: 314px;"><img src="/i/header_logo.jpg" width="314" height="92" alt="Logo" /><br /><img src="/i/woman.jpg" width="314" height="617" alt="Woman" /></td>
I'm previewing this in my browser and the two images are separated by some space. I also have a global line of CSS resets at the top like:
<style type="text/css">
body,div,dl,dt,dd,ul,ol,li,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,pre,form,fieldset,input,textarea,p,blockquote,th,td{margin:0;padding:0;}table{border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:0;}fieldset,img{border:0;}address,caption,cite,code,dfn,em,strong,th,var{font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;}ol,ul{list-style:none;}caption,th{text-align:left;}h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-size:100%;font-weight:normal;}q:before,q:after{content:'';}abbr,acronym{border:0;}
</style>
Does anyone know how to stack two images in a <td> and have them flush against each other?
Update: It turns out I had a doctype at the top like a normal web page and that caused the issue. It had nothing to do with my HTML/CSS combo.
I figured out the problem. I didn't have a doctype defined and therefore the rendering mode was really messed up.
alternatively try align="left" on your images. Works in some email clients.
You could cheat, and embed another table within the column containing the pics.
<td>
<table>
<tr><td align="left"><img1 ...></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left"><img2 ...></td></tr>
</table>
</td>
Is that what you mean by stacked and flush?