95
DarKneT
7y

You think developing websites cross browsers is hard

Try developing emails.

tables, inline css, Outlook developers on drugs, Gmail developers trying to get high, and abandon most of the things you know about modern web standards

Comments
  • 7
    I find making emails work in outlook will generally solve issues with other clients, gmail has a few quirks but can usually solve them.

    It’s when everything needs to be vertically aligned and mobile responsive then your going to a whole other level of hell.
  • 5
    Not to forget, gotta keep it as slim as possible...
  • 4
    @C0D4 well our designers gave a new design with a grid layout, and it has to be responsive as well

    on mobile right side has to come to left and left side has to go to right

    Cause the designer dick biscuit recently looked into Boostrap push and pull
  • 4
    @DarKneT
    Oh god, I know where I would tell that designer to shove their idea.
  • 1
    My go-to source for help when wrestling html emails is https://campaignmonitor.com/css/
  • 1
    @lotd

    Yeah, cause if you put too many images QA sends it back saying it's not gonna load, put too many codes automated code tester goes off saying this client has limited support for this

    life in hell

    @C0D4

    Too late to do that, everything's been approved before i joined this team 😐

    @knuppelsmurf

    yeah ended up there after a while, that's how i found out gmail prefix our classes
  • 1
    @jAsE

    My god it looks beautiful 😍
    I wish it worked inside Marketing Cloud
  • 1
    @jAsE
    I think email should have a standard renderer and not be proprietary bs for each company / client.

    I like your idea for a standardised template but if each client renders it different we’ll still be going in circles and doing something nice badly so it will work across platforms.

    Outlook and gmail drive me insane, desktop app vs web app vs mobile app are different renderings of html and css, and the god awful “let’s add our own prefixes to anything we want and break it as we see fit” sends me up the wall at times.

    @DarKneT
    This is why I believe designers should have a technical understanding of what it is they are actually asking and not be just photoshopping some beautifully impossible designs.

    Good luck!
  • 2
    I recently discovered https://mjml.io
    Provides decent integrations for various common frameworks/languages, and if that's not an option you can use their online editor and copy/paste the generated html.

    If you can get your designers to build their designs based on one of their templates you can usually get rid off most of the hassle.
  • 1
    Uh-huh

    Try viewing a table in the iOS e-mail app 6 months ago (before an update that allowed tables in e-mails)
  • 1
    Foundation for emails is such a godsend. Outlook still has a few quirks but it has so many automated fixes.
    http://foundation.zurb.com/emails.h...
  • 1
    You've no chance when outlook uses 'Word' as a rendering engine. No fucking chance. You can fucking forget responsive unless you do some table fudge.
  • 3
    Mjml really helps. Emails still suck balks though
  • 1
    Foundation Inky just saying...
  • 1
    I've been here several times. Outlook ruins most "good" solutions.

    Forget everything you know about web development and over use tables.
  • 3
    @kurtr used that last time. God, i love it 💕
  • 1
    @falloutghst @kurtr

    Yeah I'm gonna look into mjml, well I'm not sure I'll be able to fully convince them to switch like that, but I'm gonna give it a try

    @AndSoWeCode

    I'm so glad i joined recently

    @penry @jamesharrington

    yeah i proposed this, didn't go pass the head dev ( cause he's used to Marketing Cloud, he didn't feel comfortable with this )
  • 1
    @LynxMagnus @helloworld

    Exactly, most of the stuff works on Outlook 2003 and 2016, but everything in between is a gift from satan himself

    @Jop-

    oh no...., don't make the mistake of thinking that, gmail injects the shit out of our classes and id's with an unique id, so you can kiss your media queries good bye
  • 1
    Developing HTML-E-Mails is like developing a Website for the 1970s
  • 1
    Cunt fuck, i thought i'd got rid of a client that i did some mailchimp templates for a while back. I told him to go elsewhere. He did, a number of people, now he is back begging me to work with him again. He had some templates done that were shit and fell apart in clients inboxes. Im fucking good at it as ive done them for years but i fucking hate doing them. I have more lucrative enjoyable work i could be doing.
  • 1
    And what is even worse, there are some weird guys that think that sending HTML with totally screwed up text alternative or no text alternative at all is a good practice. I don't care how many images they can fit into one mail, I want the relevant information and no fucking tables and images and videos and flashing ads!
  • 2
    Obvious solution:
    Create entire email as on massive jpg. Convert jpg into ascii art. Paste into email.
    😂
  • 0
    @Jop- nope, apparently it's for better security 😑

    @TobyAsE at least back then we didn't have this many standards and this many clients, everything else evolved, emails didn't

    @helloworld sadly i don't have the option of saying no, this is a new job and I'm the head of my team
  • 1
    @mhudson < This guy is living in the future 😂😂
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