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Re: E-mail

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 15, 2013 1:51AM

2013-02-15 10:28, Joe Chidzik wriote:

>> Has there been any formalized standards set out for e-mail messages
>> that are html based?
>
> http://www.email-standards.org/ gives you an idea of the support
> across different mail clients for CSSHTML elements. Not a set of
> standards for producing mail, but possibly useful. Also allows you to
> test support for these elements in your own client.

The site looks very interesting! It took some time to figure out what
the proposed standards are there, though. It seems that their "Acid
test" at http://www.email-standards.org/acid-test/ is more or less meant
to specify the minimal requirements. And it is probably mainly based on
experience of what e-mail clients can be expected to handle,
realistically speaking. It seems to be rather cautious, even implying
that tables cannot be used at all. (Simple tables often work quite OK in
HTML e-mail, in many clients.)

On the other hand, this seems to be mostly about technical possibilities
of having your formatting obeyed by e-mail clients, rather than
accessibility. From the accessibility point of view, it is not essential
to have the sender's preferences on fonts imposed, for example. Rather,
accessibility is usually improved if text appears in the default font
face and size of the e-mail client, since this is what can be expected
to work for the reader (and can be tuned for him).

So although the site is very interesting for people who sent HTML e-mail
in general, it does not address the question how such mail should be
written in order to be accessible. I suppose the WCAG 2.0 guidelines
apply to HTML e-mail, too - but this is not a very operational
description, since those guidelines deal with the much more complex
world of web content (and do not deal with the important specifics of
e-mail).

Yucca