CSS in email: now *that* is annoying

[jducoeur]

I just went to send a nicely-styled email through Querki, and was distressed to find that it *completely* failed. I had figured that email support wouldn't be complete CSS, but absolutely nothing stylistic happened.

A bit of research, and what do I find? It turns out that many mail readers (including, notably, Gmail) simply do not support modern CSS in the slightest. You can't do anything with real stylesheets -- you have to go back to 1990's styling, with explicit inline styles everywhere.

Of course, Querki was built to modern spec -- it *thinks* in terms of stylesheets, and exposes and uses styles that way. There is, quite deliberately, no support for old-fashioned inline styles, since they are deprecated by most good style guides these days.

*Sigh*. Pain in the tuchus. I've added style support in email to the to-do list, but folks should note that it'll be a fair while before it happens -- it's going to be a lot of work to make it work even minimally, and email is very much a "because we have to" feature. For now, Querki-sent email will necessarily be fairly plain...

Comments

[kihou.livejournal.com]

Heh, with that subject line, I was expecting you were going to be complaining about modern email that can't be read in plain text clients. ^_^

I sorta wonder how you could support non-inline CSS in Gmail without security holes. iframes, I guess?

[laurion]

Email, in retrospect, is such a poorly designed system for the modern era. No reliable formatting (I still actively prefer plaintext most of the time), no real security, the illusion of reliability, and even now there are struggles with manageability, and spam, no matter how good the Google (or other) tools are.

[joking] You could always have the system generate a PDF and send it as an attachment. Email has no interactivity beyond html links, and a PDF is just as good. [/joking]