HTML emails – finally a new source of info

The “How do I write an HTML email” question is a perennial. For years, people have referred to the same rather old resources for information about this. Now there’s a new article about it, Vitamin Features – HTML Emails – Taming the Beast, by David Greiner that sheds more up-to-date light on the subject. Greiner’s article offers guidelines for, how you should design your email, how you should code it and finally the essential content you should include.

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Tip: What is semantic markup and why should you care?

The word semantic gets tossed around a lot in connection with web design. A comment from someone made me realize I had overlooked discussing what that means here on Web Teacher. I use the word logical quite often instead, although I am not in a majority by talking about the logic of HTML tags as relating to sematics.

To me, however, HTML is simple because it’s logical. You can learn the majority of what you need to know about HTML in just a few hours. (It’s CSS that mortifies with its learning curve.) If text is meant to be a heading, there is a semantic (or logical) tag to create a heading element: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6. Creating a bit of text that is big and bold and merely looks like a heading in a computer monitor is not the same thing. Why? Because the heading element carries the semantic meaning “this is a heading” as part of the markup. And that meaning attaches to the text no matter where or how the text is accessed: a computer monitor, a screen reader, a handheld, a cell phone, a printer.

Another way to think about it is to realize that HTML tags are self-describing. The tag itself explains the logic or semantics of what it is meant to markup. p describes a paragraph. li describes a list item. cite describes a citation. strong describes strong empahsis. See how that works?

Using the tags to create semantic meaning makes your content usable in any Internet-capable device with the logical organization carried with it.

In the move to separate content from presentation (or meaning from appearance) the first requirement is solidly structured semantic HTML. CSS can do literally anything with appearance, as long as there is a logical structure to the content that will hold up no matter how the content is styled. Without the proper HTML semantic underpinning for your content, no amount of CSS can make your page work in multiple Internet-capable devices.

In the world of semantic content, a table is used to display tabular data, a list is marked up as a list, indented text is only marked up as a blockquote when it actually is quoted material, text that needs emphasis is marked up as an em element, and so on through the logic of every HTML tag.

There is room for discussion about what element is semantically correct as markup for a certain bit of content. The lively discussions on topics about the best semantic markup for certain types of content at Simple Bits/Simple Quiz lead Simple Bits’ Dan Cederholm to write two excellent books about semantic markup: Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design. If you want more detail about the topic, pick up one of those books and get the complete story.

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How Mike Cherim solved the Accesssite.org problem

The folks at accesssites.org strugged with the problem I talked about several times here in which their showcase page was unreadable by Safari 2.0 on Mac OS X (Tiger). It was indeed baffling and the resolution is still a little baffling to everyone involved. Mike documented it all here. Beast-Blog.com | Mike Cherim’s Professional and Personal Web Log | C.H.U.B. – Comment Hyphenation Ugh Bug

It turns out to be comments with two nested hyphens in them that caused the problem, but the weird part is it only affected the showcase page and not other pages coded the same way. Mike would like any others who’ve had a similar problem to let him know, as this does not seem to be documented anywhere else within Google’s range.

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A Public Apology to Access Sites

I had given “the mean mouth” to Access Sites a couple of times recently about their Access Sites Showcase page. It turns out that my normal setup on Mac OS X with Safari 2 is the rare combination that had a problem with the page. Most people were seeing a perfectly readable page with a white background.

Here’s what I heard from the Access Sites folks, “We did test extensively on other platforms, other browsers and operating systems, and UAs like Jaws, Lynx, etc., knowing full well that people would be giving us the eyeball (plus we do care and try to do it right anyway), but it is possible we missed something. Based on your reply we took 240 screenshots today and it seems as if we may indeed have an issue on the Macintosh OSX 10.4 using Safari 2.0.”

So the short version of the story is that they will indeed tackle this one and I’m sure they’ll have it fixed ASAP. My job, now, is to issue this public apology to the folks at Access Sites for sending out harsh words in their direction.

I once again encourage all my readers to prepare and submit accessible work to them for consideration in their showcase. My original thought when I first heard of the site was what a great idea and I still think it is. Not only a great idea, but accessible to everyone, even Mac OS 10.4/Safari 2.0 (and every other device out there in page rendering land).