I'm using the premailer-rails3 gem which pulls styles inline for html emails, and I'm trying to get it working with Twitter bootstrap.
https://github.com/fphilipe/premailer-rails3
It looks like some styles come in correctly, but not all of them. I'm wondering if anyone has a nice working example of getting their Twitter Bootstrap css (modified or not) into an html email.
Thanks!
If you mean "Can I use the stylistic presentation of Bootstrap in an email?" then you can, though I don't know anybody that has done it yet. You'll need to recode everything in tables though.
If you are after functionality, it depends on where your emails are viewed. If a significant proportion of your users are on Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail (and these typically add up to around 75% of email clients) then a lot of Bootstrap's goodness is not possible. Mac Mail, iOS Mail and Gmail on Android are much better at rendering CSS, so if you are targeting mostly mobile devices it's not quite so bad.
JavaScript - completely off limits. If you try, you'll probably go straight to email hell (a.k.a. spam folder). This means that LESS is also out of bounds, although you can obviously use the resulting CSS styles if you want to.
Inline CSS is much safer to use than any other type of CSS (embedded is possible, linked is a definite no). Media queries are possible, so you can have some kind of responsive design. However, there is a long list of CSS attributes that don't work - essentially, the box model is largely unsupported in email clients. You need to structure everything with tables.
font-face - you can only use external images. All other external resources (CSS files, fonts) are excluded.
glyphs and sprites - because of Outlook 2007's weird implementation of background-images (VML), you cant use background-repeat or position.
pseudo-selectors are not possible - e.g. :hover, :active states cannot be styled separately
There are loads of answers on SO, and lots of other links on the internet at large.
http://www.email-standards.org/
http://htmlemailboilerplate.com/
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
I apologize for resurecting this old thread, but I just wanted to let everyone know there is a very close Bootstrap like CSS framework specifically created for email styling, here is the link: http://zurb.com/ink/
Hope it helps someone.
Ninja edit: It has since been renamed to Foundation for Emails and the new link is: https://foundation.zurb.com/emails.html
Silent but deadly edit: New link https://get.foundation/emails.html
Here are a few things you cant do with email:
Include a section with styles. Apple Mail.app supports it, but Gmail and Hotmail do not, so it's a no-no. Hotmail will support
a style section in the body but Gmail still doesn't.
Link to an external stylesheet. Not many email clients support this, best to just forget it.
Background-image / Background-position. Gmail is also the culprit on this one.
Clear your floats. Gmail again.
Margin. Yep, seriously, Hotmail ignores margins. Basically any CSS positioning at all doesn't work.
Font-anything. Chances are Eudora will ignore anything you try to declare with fonts.
Source: http://css-tricks.com/using-css-in-html-emails-the-real-story/
Mailchimp has email templates you can use - here
A few more resources that should help you
Best practices for styling HTML emails
Styling html in email
Styling HTML email for Gmail
You can use this https://github.com/advancedrei/BootstrapForEmail for b-strapping your email.
What about Bootstrap Email? This seems to really nice and compatible with bootstrap 4.
I spent some time recently looking into building html email templates, the best solution I found was to use this http://htmlemailboilerplate.com/. I have since built 3 quite complex templates and they have worked well in the various email clients.
Hi Brian Armstrong， visit this link.
This blog tells you how to integrate Rails with Bootstrap less (using premailer-rails).
If you're using bootstrap sass, you could do the same:
start by importing some Bootstrap sass files into email.css.scss
#import "bootstrap-sprockets";
#import "bootstrap/variables";
#import "bootstrap/mixins";
#import "bootstrap/scaffolding";
#import "bootstrap/type";
#import "bootstrap/buttons";
#import "bootstrap/alerts";
#import 'bootstrap/normalize';
#import 'bootstrap/tables';
#import 'bootstrap/progress-bars';
and then in your view <head> section add
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "email" %>
The best approach I've come up with is to use Sass imports on a selected basis to pull in your bootstrap (or any other) styles into emails as might be needed.
First, create a new scss parent file something like email.scss for your email style. This could look like this:
// Core variables and mixins
#import "css/main/ezdia-variables";
#import "css/bootstrap/mixins";
#import "css/main/ezdia-mixins";
// Import base classes
#import "css/bootstrap/scaffolding";
#import "css/bootstrap/type";
#import "css/bootstrap/buttons";
#import "css/bootstrap/alerts";
// nest conflicting bootstrap styles
.bootstrap-style {
//use single quotes for nested imports
#import 'css/bootstrap/normalize';
#import 'css/bootstrap/tables';
}
#import "css/main/main";
// Main email classes
#import "css/email/zurb";
#import "css/email/main";
Then in your email templates, only reference your compiled email.css file, which only contains the selected bootstrap styles referenced and nested properly in your email.scss.
For example, certain bootstrap styles will conflict with Zurb's responsive table style. To fix that, you can nest bootstrap's styles within a parent class or other selector in order to call bootstrap's table styles only when needed.
This way, you have the flexibility to pull in classes only when needed. You'll see that I use http://zurb.com/ which is a great responsive email library to use. See also http://zurb.com/ink/
Lastly, use a premailer like https://github.com/fphilipe/premailer-rails3 mentioned above to process the style into inline css, compiling inline styles to only what is used in that particular email template. For instance, for premailer, your ruby file could look something like this to compile an email into inline style.
require 'rubygems' # optional for Ruby 1.9 or above.
require 'premailer'
premailer = Premailer.new('http://www.yourdomain.com/TestSnap/view/emailTemplates/DeliveryReport.jsp', :warn_level => Premailer::Warnings::SAFE)
# Write the HTML output
File.open("delivery_report.html", "w") do |fout|
fout.puts premailer.to_inline_css
end
# Write the plain-text output
File.open("output.txt", "w") do |fout|
fout.puts premailer.to_plain_text
end
# Output any CSS warnings
premailer.warnings.each do |w|
puts "#{w[:message]} (#{w[:level]}) may not render properly in #{w[:clients]}"
end
Hope this helps! Been struggling to find a flexible email templating framework across Pardot, Salesforce, and our product's built-in auto-response and daily emails.
The trick here is that you don't want to include the whole bootstrap. The issue is that email clients will ignore the media queries and process all the print styles which have a lot of !important statements.
Instead, you need to only include the specific parts of bootstrap that you need. My email.css.scss file looks like this:
#import "bootstrap-sprockets";
#import "bootstrap/variables";
#import "bootstrap/mixins";
#import "bootstrap/scaffolding";
#import "bootstrap/type";
#import "bootstrap/buttons";
#import "bootstrap/alerts";
#import 'bootstrap/normalize';
#import 'bootstrap/tables';
Emails require tables in order to work properly.
Inky (by foundation for emails) is a templating language that converts simple HTML tags into the complex table HTML required for emails.
Example
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<table align="center" class="container">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table class="row">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th class="small-12 large-12 columns first last">
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Put content in me!</th>
<th class="expander"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</body>
</html>
Will produce this:
Related
On my laravel app, I'm using a forum package called "chatter".
This forum is injected into my master layout, so it looks like this:
nav bar
chatter package
footer
It's injected into a container called <div id="chatter">, and its styles are found in the style sheet chatter.css, which is separate from my main sheet.
The problem is, some of the styles in this sheet are conflicting with my nav and footer. Furthermore, some of the styles in my main sheet are affecting the forum (albeit minimally, so I don't mind making the changes manually).
I can't change the markup, but I can edit the styles.
So how could I make it so that all the styles found in chatter.css ONLY apply to what's inside of <div id="chatter">?
Add #chatter to every style in chatter.css like this
#chatter table{...}
#chatter tr{...}
#chatter td{...}
etc.
If style is for level above the chatter div then add after like this:
html #chatter{..}
body #chatter div{...}
You will have to namespace your CSS as user Nawed Khan pointed out but there is a much simpler way to do that than changing each of your styles manually. This method uses less to handle it for you.
Drop this in a file called chatter.less.
#chatter {
#import (less) 'chatter.css';
}
Then you need to include it on your page...
<link rel="stylesheet/less" type="text/css" href="chatter.less" >
Then you need to include less.js AFTER you've included your .less file.
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/less.js/2.7.2/less.min.js"></script>
In your .less file you might have to mess with the path to chatter.css, I believe it's going to be relative to whatever file you are including the .less file on.
I am working on a presentation website that has 7 HTML pages. Is it more efficient to have only one big HTML file than 7 smaller ones?
The reason I'm asking this is because the header, footer and 20% of the body are the same for all pages. The parts that are different have only lists, p and h tags.
Thanks!
The performance difference is almost certainly negligible, but by having one html file instead of the seven, you get a smoother ux by changing only what's different with javascript (no page refresh, no flicker).
If you want to stick to vanilla js or jquery, put all the html in one file and toggle the elements' css display properties.
A cleaner and easier way, though, is to use a framework like Angular. That way you can break the dynamic elements into partials, and you'll end up with eight clean, concise html pages (total html = one page option), and need no javascript at all. The best implementation depends on your specifics, a simple one might look something like:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html ng-app>
...
<body ng-init="partial = 'initial.html'>
<!-- header, whatever part of that 20% -->
<!-- put dynamic elements in separate html files (no html tags or anything, just the divs or whatever -->
<a ng-click="partial = '/path/something.html'">something</a>
<a ng-click="partial = '/path/whatever.html'">whatever</a>
...
<div ng-include="partial">
<!-- rest of that 20%, footer -->
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.3.15/angular.min.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
I like Angular a lot. It's incredibly powerful, yet you can use it for super small things like this with just one script tag. (If you want the back/forward buttons to work, look into ng-route.) Either way, your presentation will be a lot more impressive if you don't use seven static html files. Cheers
The answer is no, it is not efficient to have only one big HTML file compared to 7 smaller files. For if you have many smaller files, let's say for example you have 1 file for header, 1 file for footer, 1 file for body and others. By that you could just easily modify and trace your code by looking on the file on what you want to modify and not by looking on the whole HTML file.
I have web application which uses Foundation.
I am not good at foundation and i have to develop few pages where i want to use Bootstrap but i dont want to mix with other company css.
SO i was looking if i can wrap all bootsrap inside some class like bootstrap. so that if i want to use bootsrap . i can use like
<div class="bootstrap"> <table class="table">
</div>
I don't know sass and all that.
is it possible to download some bootstrap css from online with some pre defined prefix
If you don't use SASS or LESS, you can use http://www.css-prefix.com/
Make a short prefix (my recommendation)
If you use a space, then it will be a parent class.
Paste in the compiled version of the CSS file
Click the run button
Result snippet:
.tb.col-xs-1, .tb.col-sm-1, .tb.col-md-1, ...
Indeed you could use namespaces, see: How to namespace Twitter Bootstrap so styles don't conflict, http://lesscss.org/features/#features-overview-feature-namespaces-and-accessors and
In the case you need Bootstrap's CSS for tables only, you can compile the following Less / SASS code, after downloading the source code at http://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/#download:
**less / SASS **
.bootstrap {
#import "variables";
#import "mixins/table-row";
#import "tables";
}
As you see you can use the same code for Less and SASS, notice that the order of the imports does matter when compiling the SASS version.
update
The accepted solution only prefix classes (or selector having a class). In the case that you want to use Bootstrap's CSS to style your HTML tables. Your prefixed don't have bootstrap's styles for the table, th and caption selectors.
Even when you have never used Less / CSS before you can do the prefixing with Less (or SASS) easily leveraging an online compiler. A list of online Less compilers can be found at: http://lesscss.org/usage/#online-less-compilers. Also codepen has an online LESS and SASS compiler.
The only thing you have to know is what files to import. Bootstrap's Less files are well organized. You should always import variables.less and mixins.less. The mixins.less imports all other mixins. Mixins do not output, so importing all of them will slow down the compilation, but do not appear in the compiled CSS code.
In the case you want a prefixed version of the table CSS you can run the following code in one of the online compilers:
.bootstrap {
#import url("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/twbs/bootstrap/master/less/variables.less");
#import url("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/twbs/bootstrap/master/less/mixins.less");
#import url("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/twbs/bootstrap/master/less/tables.less");
}
An demo can be found at: http://codepen.io/bassjobsen/pen/PwPNBP
It sounds like you want to namespace Bootstrap, which is pretty easy to do using SASS (which Foundation uses, I believe). So in your SASS file (should have a .scss extension) you can import Bootstrap within a class name like this:
.bootstrap {
#import 'bootstrap';
}
And then you can reference Bootstrap in your HTML like this:
<body class="bootstrap">
<div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-6">
<table class="table"></table>
</div>
</body>
You can download SASS version of Bootstrap here: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-sass. Drop that SCSS file into the same directory as your main SCSS file and then you can import.
Imo the answers to this question are problematic. If you introduce a generic class to namespace everything, such as this...
.bootstrap {
#import 'bootstrap';
}
You are effectively increasing the CSS specificity.
What you really need is a tool that migrates Bootstrap to change the class names themselves.
For example,
E.g.
<div class="alert">
<div class="something alert">
<div class="something alert alert-danger">
Should become
<div class="bs-alert">
<div class="something bs-alert">
<div class="something bs-alert bs-alert-danger">
It should leave "something" alone because this class does not occur in Bootstrap.
To my knowledge such a tool does not exist (open source).
#Wolfr's answer has described the problem pretty well - in 2019 http://www.css-prefix.com/ doesn't work anymore, and all the other solutions that are in google top10 only increase css specificity by wrapping all bootstrap classes with the parent class.
That approach isn't bullet-proof:
e.g. if you make
.custom_namespace .col-3 {
width: 25%;
}
this won't protect you from someone using !important to bootstrap class for whatever reason some would do it.
.col-3 {
width: 99% !important;
}
Instead, there is actually one work I found through npm, where developer has indeed implemented that custom prefix AND even made it work with bootstrap's JS file. But it's only for Bootstrap 3: https://www.npmjs.com/package/bootstrap-sass-namespace
This will generate all bootstrap classes in form of e.g. .custom_prefix_col-3 {}
One more option if you need truly namespaced Bootstrap 4 css:
In my case I needed Bootstrap 4, so I opened bootstrap css file, ran search and replace in Sublime Text with Regular Expression, using this value for search:
\.(?<TAG>[a-z]{1,3}) - this captures all the beginnings of the classes by using period and first one to three letter characters as opposed to just searching for period (.) and risking to mess up float values for CSS properties.
and for replace I used .the_prefix_I_need\1
This allowed me to produce truly isolated bootstrap 4 css file that for sure won't be messed up if someone somewhere at the websites where my app is included will decide to redefine some bootstrap classes with !important.
I want to write an application that sends html formatted email. I have the css and html files as I want them. I'm trying to send the email with the embedded css using the style element like so:
<style type="text/css">
h1 {border-width: 1; border: solid; text-align: center}
</style>
<h1>Title</h1>
<p>Content of the email</p>
It works in some clients (e.g. it works on Mac OSX mail app) and not others (e.g. it doesn't work when reading the email in gmail). When I translate the above to:
<h1 style="border-width: 1; border: solid; text-align: center">Title</h1>
<p>Content of the email</p>
Then it works everywhere. What I'm looking for is a way to place the css as style properties on their corresponding dom elements according the css rules I defined. So for a given file.css and file.html I want to create a new file result.html which displays correctly but in which all the css is embedded as style properties in the dom elements. Any ideas?
This is what you're looking for:
http://www.mailchimp.com/labs/inlinecss.php
Hope this helps!
Drop the style tag, use inline styles.
I have the same issue - I have a php app that sends out a confirmation email once a customer has placed an order. In various email clients it's fine, but web based clients tend to strip out the HEAD tag, which includes the STYLE tag - so any style is lost.
While it's still a good idea, as #Zack mentions, to include a plain text version of what you wanted to say, nobody likes to read plain text. I doubt that Zack is reading Stack Overflow on Lynx, for example.
A quick Google search for 'CSS inliner php' brings up: http://classes.verkoyen.eu/css_to_inline_styles
Also it seems that this question has been asked before on stackoverflow (at least once), at least for php, and there was a Ruby answer given in php class to inline css styles?
I want to write an application that sends html formatted email
Never do this. Email MUST be plain text. You cannot even rely on attachments.
Since a lot of email clients ignore the HEAD tag, can I embed an inline stylesheet in the body?
The short answer is no. Gmail strips the tag and it's content.
Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Mail does not strip style-tags in the body-element.
But take a look at "The Ultimate Guide to CSS" for HTML email over at Campaign Monitor.
Creating an HTML email that works in every email client is hard. I spent several months refining a good looking template.
http://commadot.com/the-holy-mail/ - original blog with my findings.
http://commadot.com/email-best-practices/ - latest greatest.
Specific answer to your question: Gmail will be ok with style="" but not with a <style> block.
You might want to check out the free html email templates that CampaignMonitor and MailChimp (EDIT: and Ink by Zurb) provide:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/templates/
http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/templates/
http://zurb.com/ink/
There's an updated version of Campaign Monitor's helpful guide here:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
Unfortunately, the most reliable HTML to use in emails is totally stone age
EDIT: Ink has an "inliner" tool that takes the contents of style tags and inlines them onto the appropriate elements: http://zurb.com/ink/inliner.php
Most gmail clients now support embedded CSS as of September 2016, so it should be safe to do.
https://litmus.com/blog/gmail-to-support-responsive-email-design
Yes you can. However you have to keep in mind that few email clients respect css standards. Just stick to basic css properties like margin and padding, etc., and it should all be fine.
Also you can style your html elements inline (<div style="">) though it's not an elegant solution.
The top answer is outdated. Gmail now supports using media query's along with other css properties now - https://developers.google.com/gmail/design/css
As others have pointed out, the accepted answer is out of date.
In my own tests, as of 8/20/2022, Gmail supports elements with classes, and the use of the <style> tag, as long as it is in the <head>. Also, Gmail no longer strips out inline classes for elements.
Example email:
<head>
<style>
div.mydiv { background-color: blue; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class='mydiv'>This is the contents of my email message! Thank you
google, for observing the style tag!</div>
</body>