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Your most frustrating HTML/CSS exp.?
Week 140 Group Rant
ElectroMantis
5y

Forget about Internet explorer compatibility, EMAIL TEMPLATES are the actual worst. Outlook uses the same html rendering engine as MS WORD. It's sooo painful. All the bad practices you had to do 15 years ago, you have to do when you write email templates.

YOU WILL NOT KNOW PAIN until you have to make an email template, that works in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, OUTLOOK, outlook.com, outlook for mac, MOBILE, Android, the gmail app, IOS, apple mail, and so on. And after you make an unholy abomination of table garbage, then having to make it responsive/mobile friendly after all that!

If something is broken in one client, fixing it will break something in a different client! And then having to take a stab in the dark to try to fix it and then sending yet another test email (which costs $ per test)

I must have slashed decades off my life having to build email templates. It really is horrendous. There are frameworks like Zurb for email that at least let you feel like you're using a modern workflow. But things break just as often.

Honestly if you have the option, use a wysiwyg editor for building emails. At least when it does break (and they all will) you can at least blame the software.

Which is better than spending 4 hours on why that table cell doesn't line up correctly in outlook.

rant

emails

html

wk140
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Comments
  • 5
    5y
    in my opinion we should simply drop support for realky old standards. especially ms, needs to be forced to support modern stanards. Why should we support something so old, that the developer of the software itself doesnt fix?
  • 2
    5y
    I feel you fam. Literally ranted about the same thing a while ago. Worst of it? I'm not a web dev, have never worked with html or css or wp before. So yeah, was painful to find out that my pretty design won't work on outlook and I have to ue a table layout. Also, guess what program my boss has to few emails... sigh.

    But tbh nobody complained about the newsletter. Except me. I complained to my boss a lot about how this technicly is not my job since we literally have project partners which are responsible for the website and such. But they had no clue about this either and I still ended up doing this. And they get a full salary while I get minimum wage since I'm a student. Argh..
  • 2
    5y
    And them you have guys like him https://youtu.be/tVQcfghzwJI
  • 1
    5y
    You could check out mjml.io, takes care of most of the hassle for you :)
  • 4
    5y
    Oh man. I naïvely accepted a job doing a MailChimp template for $250 once thinking it would be simple because the design was simple. Then learned that you are basically required to commit every. single. CSS sin in the books to get it to behave. If the style wasn’t rmbedded directly in the style tag for what you wanted to modify, forget it. Forget any kind of DIV alignment. And good luck with Outlook.
  • 1
    5y
    @stop I 100 percent agree. It's unfortunate that the latest versions of outlook still use the same word html engine from decades ago.

    Funny thing is outlook used to o use Trident, but they made the switch because of that antitrust lawsuit with Netscape ( something about them not wanting Explorer bundled with Windows )

    Then Netscape died and Mozilla formed. So uhhh thanks a lot Mozilla!
  • 2
    5y
    Oh man, it was challenging but so stressful
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