Good article with lots of useful tips, especially the info about paragraph margins, and the Windows Live Hotmail image hack – that one’s always puzzled me.
I have to admit though, I still do not use CSS much at all in my emails, it’s just still too unstable for me. So it’s font tags for font styling, line breaks for paragraph spacing, and yep – spacer gifs when they’re needed. I’ll add inline CSS if I feel the need to add in a little bit of progressive enhancement at the end, but that’s it. It’s gotta work first and foremost without CSS for me.
Even using width values on cells I have seen to be bizarrely flaky, and cellpadding (which is mentioned a few times here) can play total havoc in Outlook 2007, so I make a note to never use it. When it’s needed, 1px spacers remove these problems for the most popular email clients.
Lewis Cave
Good article with lots of useful tips, especially the info about paragraph margins, and the Windows Live Hotmail image hack – that one’s always puzzled me.
I have to admit though, I still do not use CSS much at all in my emails, it’s just still too unstable for me. So it’s font tags for font styling, line breaks for paragraph spacing, and yep – spacer gifs when they’re needed. I’ll add inline CSS if I feel the need to add in a little bit of progressive enhancement at the end, but that’s it. It’s gotta work first and foremost without CSS for me.
Even using width values on cells I have seen to be bizarrely flaky, and cellpadding (which is mentioned a few times here) can play total havoc in Outlook 2007, so I make a note to never use it. When it’s needed, 1px spacers remove these problems for the most popular email clients.