I need to do the following formatting in my email as instructed to me. As I've read and searched around, emails are supposed to use html1 to 4 and inline styling and tables. I've tried using inline styling using margins but it's just a pain. It's not working in outlook and I'm just pulling my hair in frustration. Can anyone help?
Not all CSS is supported in HTML. See this site http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ which has a list of what is supported or not.
One thing I have done in the past is: make a regular HTML + CSS page. Then using internet explorer on the "Page" menu there is an option to "send page as email" this should copy the HTML and CSS into outlook for you, then you can use that as your starting point.
I'm going to assume that you're asking for a better way to make emails, and that you know how to do what you need to do and its just getting frustrating dealing with inline code.
Its best if you don't inline your styles under development. Just code it like a normal website. And then use this tool to bring the styles inline:
Premailer
In addition, reference here for things you can and cannot use:
Email CSS Compatibility
PS, here are some good resources for getting started:
HTML Email Boilerplate <-- code for very custom designs
Mailchimp Templates <-- very complete set of common email layouts
Generally speaking, it's better to avoid complex styling in emails. Even if it's sad to say, email clients are still bad in interpreting stylish HTML codes.
Just stay on old-fashioned tables and basic formatting (bold, italic, etc).
If you need graphic awesomeness, I suggest you to use a single, big picture. But only as last resort.
Related
This exact question was asked in 2012 here. The consensus was, yes, use in-line styles.
But is this still the case in now 2019?
I have tested in gmail, and it seems to work ok.
So can I stop using inline styles in html emails?
Update: I found this list of email clients that support the header style element.
It's been more than a year since stopped building HTML emails, but I would say to use in-line styles if you want your emails to display properly in the old versions of Outlook. The only thing I used to put in the head was media queries and some classes to change font-size, colour, etc on smaller breakpoints. Maybe there is a better way to build those now, that´s just my opinion and what worked for me around a year ago :).
Since there are still many ancient email clients being used, no, it's not a good idea.
However, there is one thing I learned that I didn't know when I wrote this and that is that there are tools to inline your styles after the HTML is created.
So you can start with clean html, then run it through an in-liner and then send it out.
I have used HTML in its basic form, and I mainly work on "server side" (of Enterprise application, mainly based in Java EE).
From what I understand, HTML is the "pages" which we see in an browser (that source code which a GUI developer writes and which a browser renders appropriately).
For example in an HTML tag, we write "h1" element, and the browser displays the text within as bold.
Now why there is any need of css? From what I am aware of, CSS is used to give "style" to a html page. The confusion that I have, doesn't HTML in itself able to give the style? what were the compelling reasons for creation of css?
Can anyone help me understand this in simple words.
The code that you put in your html to style it is actually CSS. HTML actually has some built in CSS. So really, you are using CSS when you do that. Also people like to connect a separate file for CSS in bigger projects. It looks more organized, and it easier to keep track of. It is also easier to code the CSS, because it is less messy and it seems like you have a bit more functionality. In conclusion, the code in the html that you are using to style with, is actually CSS, just built in. Also, I would highly recommend separating your stylesheet and HTML file(the stylesheet is CSS). If you need help, go to codecademy and create an account. Take the HTML and CSS lesson. I found this very useful and is where I learned most of my knowledge. I would highly recommend going to that site also. The site is also free.
How do I get html content to stay in relative position and format from one browser/email to another? When developing e-newsletters, the format appears differently in one email server than in another (when testing to two of my emails).
Example: when I open the email in my gmail, the padding around the images is where I want it, but when opening it in my work Outlook, the padding is almost nonexistent.
Example: the font appears according to the style sheet in Outlook, but changes when in gmail.
How can I secure the style sheet and the positioning to keep the appearance constant?
E-mail clients are notoriously terrible at rendering HTML (especially Outlook and Lotus Notes). You will typically be writing crippled HTML with inline CSS styles. This will not get better in the near future.
Make your design as simple as possible, and you will have less trouble making it look right on many clients. The actual best practices for writing HTML will depend mostly on which clients you plan to support.
Some helpful articles that give insight into common solutions for HTML e-mail rendering problems:
Article at A List Apart
Guide at ReachCustomersOnline
There are some easy web services that can check your newsletter on multiple clients and give you screenshots of the results. They are usually worth the money:
Litmus
MailChimp
CampaignMonitor
possible duplicate: What tools to automatically inline CSS style to create email HTML code ?
note from author: Oh yeh, definitely duplicate. Sorry.
In general, HTML emails do not support proper CSS techniques.
However, it's nice to develop in these techniques because it makes it a lot quicker to play around with changes etc. (I don't need to sell the benefits of CSS to you all!)
Is there a tool that will take lovely HTML and turn it into nasty email compatible HTML with all the styles extrapolated from the CSS files and placed inline?
Even though 100% compatibility cannot be achieved due to the numerous differences in email clients out there, a tool that helps the process would be very useful, even if it simply takes the CSS and inlines it.
Campaign Monitor have an excellent guide to CSS support in email clients as of 2008. It's very comprehensive.
There are no standards for "email compatible" CSS or HTML, so a tool to perform this task is unlikely to exist. Various client strip out different tags and attribues, especially web-based ones. A lot of it is trial and error. Trial and error is difficult to automate.
I imagine you could run the text of the page through a script that will discover CSS classes and ids and store the styles for them in an array, then go through and replace class="class" with style="style" and id="id" with style="style" etc. It would just be a matter of programming the thing.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any tools, but I would think this could be done using javascript (using jQuery, prototype, or other js framework), to rip through the rendered DOM and discover applied styles and create new HTML based on that
A good start would be to have a source div tag and a target div tag and see that the HTML in the target ends up looking like the source.
Just wrote blog post about converting "good" HTML/CSS into bad, but compatible HTML/inline CSS.
I personally use Premailer for this task, you can read more about it in my post: http://www.versapay.com/developer-blog/the-art-and-science-of-email-rendering-across-email-clients/
Yes, In my experience the best are:
http://premailer.dialect.ca/
http://beaker.mailchimp.com/inline-css
http://zurb.com/ink/inliner.php
A designer coded an html template using CSS best practices. I want to use this template as an email newsletter template, but I've heard people say hotmail, yahoo and gmail offer limited support for CSS.
Am I supposed to re-code these templates using table layouts and font tags?
The short answer is Yes.
You're going to get the best compatibility across webmail accounts & email clients by using the most basic and dumbed down HTML possible.
Don't use any CSS files or <style> tags. Do everything inline.
Handle positioning with nested tables that have explicit widths
I make heavy use of HTML comments in these situations to make sure I don't get confused about where I am in the layout.
All text should be surrounded by <font> tags with the font style information.
Images should have explicit widths & heights.
This helps the email retain its proper layout when images are blocked.
I usually test on a minimum of the following:
Outlook 2003
Outlook 2007
Most of your headaches will come from here.
Thunderbird
Entourage (OSX version of Outlook)
Gmail
Hotmail
Yahoo Mail
You're usually in pretty good shape if you get something that shows up properly on all of those.
We use Exact Target and they have an HTML preview feature but it's not perfect. I've run into a lot of situations where an email looked good in the preview but still came through broken in Outlook 2007.
Mark above said everything that you need to do to develop email templates (it's the 90's all over again), but I wanted to add one last thing:
http://www.email-standards.org/ is a great resource to see how different email clients interpret HTML and CSS.
To build on what Mark said:
If at all possible, avoid using CSS at all (though, it's usually alright for things like text). Use tables for all positioning, empty <td> elements for padding/smaller positioning bits.
And even with all this, it's only going to look perfect in a few email programs/sites. HTML email is, I'm fairly confident in saying, utterly impossible to do in such a way that it shows up perfectly in all mail clients/apps.
You'll have to go back to stone-age HTML to get HTML emails to work out as Mark suggested. All styles inline in the html. No STYLE tags or external stylesheets.
MailChimp and CampaignMonitor both offer excellent free HTML email templates. They also both offer email testing services that send your html emails to several different email clients and then send you screenshots of the results.
use div tag with fixed height/weigth and put all your HTML in there. It would look the same in most clients. Iv'e tried it before and it works fine.