Excellent tutorial on CSS in HTML email
November 22nd, 2005 | Published in CSS, I.A.
If you broadcast HTML email for a living then Mark Wyner’s excellent tutorial on Optimizing CSS Presentation in HTML Email is a must read.
Mark clearly demonstrates that CSS based HTML emails can be marked up in a semantic (Semantics, HTML, XHTML, and Structure) and accessible (Web Accessibility Initiative) fashion and degrade gracefully across all email environments.
Before reading this tutorial and examining the code and the output I believed that HTML e-mails required tables and liberal amounts of inline CSS. The next time I design an HTML template I will mend my ways.
Mark’s tutorial is actually part two in a series of which CSS and Email, Kissing in a Tree is part one.
Alex Robinson has recently (October 2005) published a breakthrough technique to create multi-column layouts using CSS. This is significantly different than prior attempts and seems robust.