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]

I mean, CSS doesn't have scoping. For a web client like gmail that inserts email content into a broader HTML page, you'd obviously not want email to be able to change the style of parts of the page external to the email. If you don't use an iframe, this means you probably have to rewrite the CSS classes and ids in the email by adding some particular prefix. Which wouldn't be that hard, I guess.

[jducoeur]

Ah, I hadn't gotten what you mean by the iframes. Yes, scoping is clearly essential. But I can't imagine that's rocket science. (Better not be, since I'm going to have to do it for Querki in the near future...)

[kihou.livejournal.com]

I guess you'd also have to do something clever to disable any CSS that'd set something like a background image (or anything else that makes an external request) until the user chooses to allow background images, though I guess maybe the inline CSS support already deals with that.