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

[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.