CW7
Email Standards Project
The Email Standards Project had the original madate to work with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards in email. While it looks like the actual website has been inactive since 2010, its original purpose is still on the minds of email designers everywhere.
My questions are:
- How can we ressurect the Email Standards Project to create awareness?
- How can we get changes made to Gmail and Outlook to make our lives easier?
- What specific coding issues do you want fixed?
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Although I support the cause of these groups, I think the approach is flawed. Most of these groups fail and change never happens. From my perspective, big companies like Google and Microsoft won't change unless it hurts their bottom line enough.
I think the most groundbreaking change in the email industry will be when Gmail starts supporting CSS. With the increasing importance of mobile, I can't help but imagine Google will start supporting CSS for Gmail soon enough. I predict by the end of 2015, Gmail will at least have CSS support for its mobile apps (of some kind). I'm not so keen on Microsoft doing much of anything (Office 365 OWA proves that). We'll have to continue to support those clients for a while.
But, I have a more optimistic outlook on the industry (pun not intended but intended) than most and believe it's going to progress faster than anybody anticipates. I have faith that Gmail will act first and that will open the floodgates for innovation (and hopefully put pressure on Microsoft). I'm patient enough to wait it out.
I agree. It'll be hard to get them to listen to a group of developers. I'm hoping they'll listen to their customers.
People are innovating with things like, video backgrounds, CSS animation, CSS games (shameless self promotion), inbox checkout, tabbed layouts and much more (I'm sure you've got a few new tricks up your sleeve). As these become the accepted norm, clients like Outlook and Gmail are going to appear more and more outdated to the consumer.
Consumers will hopefully start flocking to webkit clients to take advantage of these innovations, as people flocked from IE to Firefox and Chrome. Even my Mum now knows to use Chrome instead of IE.
The sad truth is that neither Microsoft nor Google are really bothered by broken emails. There's no protest outside their headquarters because customers are receiving emails that don't look as nice as they could. The only people complaining about these things are us email people -- probably people that don't use their products anyway.
I agree that these groups won't change unless it hurts their bottom line, but what was it that pushed browser companies to work with the Web Standards Project and would we be able to replicate that at all with email clients? I realize it's not the exact same thing, but I'm still curious.
Google is the premier tech company of the planet earth.
My only wish: Make the gmail app suck less.
In all seriousness, we are going to have to deal with quirks for a very long time. Even if we made outlook render perfect in the next version, we would still need to support 03 - current. I keep thinking we are as far along as we are going to get with email as a medium, then brilliant devs take it a step further. I'm just happy to be along for the ride.
Oh, and to answer one of your questions - the coding issue I most want fixed is consistency in the way things are rendered, especially when it comes to responsive design.
The intention of the Email Standards Project is awesome, however like others have said already, companies won't change anything unless its hurting either profits or adoption rates. Microsoft won't change because there well into the corporate world market with MS Office and Outlook 2003 onwards, Gmail probably won't change unless Google have a drastic change of heart.
I remember seeing an article ages ago on their website about how Microsoft are listening to feedback regarding Outlook, after some of the Outlook team posed with the" Fix Outlook" mosaic. Yeah right.. Microsoft genuinely believe that the Word engine is the best authoring tool for rich email, while that sends shudders down my entire body, they honestly believe it and won't change.
I think Office 365 also confirms that Microsoft won't change anything soon either, its even worse than Outlook and that's saying something. I really wish they'd go back to IE rendering, even more so now IE9 onwards provide great standards support, but so far we have three versions of Outlook proceeding 2003, all use Word, basically render identically, with the exception of few new quirks introduced in Outlook 2013.
The good news is you can pretty much nail Outlook issues down at the development stage, know the enemy and avoid headaches later as you create email campaigns more and more. Gmail with its lack of media query support is frustrating, but the fluid approach can be used to make the experience better.
Same rendering engine for all outlook versions. you can see lots of differences between different versions e.g. prevent outlook to add a line break in tds with not defined height or blank. Ask Gmail to allow head styles and media queries. If i see those changes coming I may cry of happiness!
Cheers!