Email Standards

I came across a site promoting “Email Standards”. It sounded like a good idea so I checked it out. What they are actually talking about is applying Web Standards to email, which is something entirely different. Web standards is about making web content available to everyone in a consistent way. This is partially achieved by writing well-formed valid (x)html documents to deliver the content, and keeping presentation separate by using CSS. So this group wants to bring this methodology that has rendered benefits to developers and users alike to the email experience.

If the web development community is interested in using the existing email standards, they would see their work is already done. “Really? Tell me more!“, you say. Think about the word document you sent to your boss, or the photos you sent your friends. That was made possible by a technology called MIME, that every email client understands. Now imagine that file is an HTML document that you’ve designed using web standards, complete with unobstrusive javascript and CSS. Your customer clicks on it, and it opens in their favorite web browser. It displays perfectly.

But what about displaying my HTML page in the message of the email? The fact that it works at all is amazing, and not in a good way. The incompatibility issue is not a small one. Lets say its 2017 (10 years from now), and the email vendors got on board with the whole “email standards” campaign of injecting HTML into email messages, and its been completed successfully. What does that get you? Not much. Because to move forward, all the email vendors standardized on xhtml 1.1 (the current standard of 2007), but in 2017 the standard is xhtml 5.3. If MIME is used to deliver the HTML content, this becomes a non-issue.

So instead of campaigning to inject web standards into email, lets push for keeping the web standards on the web.