Updated CSS Support in Email Report

June 20, 2007

After we posted an update to the CSS Support article last week, a few of you mentioned that the new PDF layout made it hard to make out the results when printed in black and white. Not only this, but it was also a challenge for anyone who was color-blind.

About the same time, Martin Focazio from New York based Magnani Caruso Dutton approached us about taking the PDF version a step further (actually, about 5 steps further). Martin reworked the results to make it much clearer which CSS selectors and properties offered the best support across the board. These were then sorted into Safe, Risky and Poorly Supported to make it much easier to decide which properties to aim for.

Download the spiffy new results in PDF (91kb) or Excel (80kb)

To top it off, the new file also includes the percentage of support each email environment offers. We've also updated the original post to include the new version of the findings. A huge thanks to Martin for all his hard work, and to everyone else for giving us feedback on the original version. As usual, we'll keep our eyes peeled for any changes in each environment moving forward. If you spot anything, let us know.

Update: I've added the Excel version of the results so you guys can tweak it to your hearts content.

Posted in: Tips & Resources

6 Comments

Noah
June 20, 2007 9:38pm

How about offering a version where the two pages are combined it so it prints on one 11x17 sheet too? For those of us with larger office printers, that would be great instead of two sheets.

Also, it would be great if you could add a percentage bar to the Support column (Excel 2007 makes this super easy). That would allow us to quickly glance at it instead of interpreting percentages.
Dave Greiner
June 20, 2007 11:05pm

Both great suggestions thanks Noah, although I think the best plan might be to post the Excel version as well. This will allow people like yourself to make whatever tweaks you want at your end instead of trying to please everybody. I’ll get that posted first thing in the morning.
G. Jason Head
June 22, 2007 11:49pm

I’ve spent the last week in a battle with Outlook 2007. I would be interested in sharing some discussion about some of the “undocumented” quarks that I kept running into. I’ve been finding that while the Microsoft specifications are rather clear, there are still a number of issues I am running into that are boggling to say the least.

Has anyone been running into problems that are not documented? Can you share them here along with your solutions?

Finally, I would also be interested in hearing how well people have been dealing with the Outlook 2007 “problem” since it’s reared it’s head. What are you doing in order to translate your designs so that it’s not broke?
Dave Greiner
June 23, 2007 12:18pm

Jason, we feel your pain on that one and are not far off launching a new forum for email designers where you can discuss the quirks and workarounds for different email environments all in one place. Look out for an announcement in the next week or two.
Scott Jacques
June 26, 2007 10:49am

As always Dave - you guys come to the rescue with resources and expertise.

A request for what I believe would make your offering that much more powerful:

1) A Browser Cam like tool where we could easily test out email creative & how the email is rendered via a testing engine to see results in various email clients and under various scenarios (ie. Gmail, Outlook 2007, Hotmail, images turned off, preview pane on, etc…).

2) A “Email This Page” tool that could be incorporated onto client websites (one that generates html based emails to friends, associates, whoever is on the receiving end of a viral request to share a web page with someone) - on top of that, what kind of analytics could be incorporated into this (if anything the ability to generate special redirects just to see how often these types of features are being used)

Whew…that’s it for now!
Dave Greiner
June 26, 2007 1:03pm

Thanks for the great suggestions Scott. You (and many others hopefully) will be pleased to know that we’re currently working on a solution to number one right now. We’ll announce plenty more about this here soon, it’s something we’re very excited about.

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