4 ms·

I see your point, but consistency of email display went out the window with HTML email. We (and Google, and hopefully everybody else providing mail readers) put

I see your point, but consistency of email display went out the window with HTML email. We (and Google, and hopefully everybody else providing mail readers) put a ton of work into sanitizing HTML before rendering it in the preview pane. This makes mail display a delicate balance between safety and preserving the sender's intent. It's already a far from trivial problem, and is one of the hundred or so non-obvious reasons why making a mail client isn't easy. What's nice about what they've done here is that they've required an additional (but now standard) level of authentication for the senders who want to include this richer, more actionable content. And they haven't hardwired this into Google Plus or some other walled garden. That's welcome, IMO.

m_eiman 13y ago
Has there been any effort to create a standard subset of HTML that is safe for email? Seems like a problem worth solving once for everybody.
- dmbaggett 13y ago
  Not that I know of, and in fact real-live HTML emails often contain complete gibberish (made-up tags, etc.) that doesn't even validate; we have a bunch of fix-up rules for this stuff. CSS is a complicating factor as well: some CSS is unsafe and must be stripped, which requires a real (error-tolerant) CSS parser to go along with your real HTML parser. And identifying remote images: you'd think that was easy right? But do you know how many ways there are to reference a .png image in HTML and CSS? At one point Facebook emails were even hiding web bugs in BGSOUND tags -- sneaky!
  - m_eiman 13y ago
    Huh. I would think that the only ones benefiting from the current state of affairs are scammers and spammers, strange that the big players haven't gotten together and done something about it.
- BrianEatWorld 13y ago
  When I got dropped into crafting newsletters, I made the mistake of not looking into what different clients support only to find that my beautiful CSS buttons and the majority of the formatting was completely useless. I agree a standard set of HTML and CSS for email would be a huge benefit. It was only afterwards that I started noticing most beautiful emails are just sliced images displayed within tables. Thats right, tables.

m_eiman 13y ago

Has there been any effort to create a standard subset of HTML that is safe for email? Seems like a problem worth solving once for everybody.

dmbaggett 13y ago
Not that I know of, and in fact real-live HTML emails often contain complete gibberish (made-up tags, etc.) that doesn't even validate; we have a bunch of fix-up rules for this stuff. CSS is a complicating factor as well: some CSS is unsafe and must be stripped, which requires a real (error-tolerant) CSS parser to go along with your real HTML parser. And identifying remote images: you'd think that was easy right? But do you know how many ways there are to reference a .png image in HTML and CSS? At one point Facebook emails were even hiding web bugs in BGSOUND tags -- sneaky!
- m_eiman 13y ago
  Huh. I would think that the only ones benefiting from the current state of affairs are scammers and spammers, strange that the big players haven't gotten together and done something about it.
BrianEatWorld 13y ago
When I got dropped into crafting newsletters, I made the mistake of not looking into what different clients support only to find that my beautiful CSS buttons and the majority of the formatting was completely useless. I agree a standard set of HTML and CSS for email would be a huge benefit. It was only afterwards that I started noticing most beautiful emails are just sliced images displayed within tables. Thats right, tables.