For the past few years, I’ve designed email newsletters for my organisation to send out. I’d code the web page using CSS and XHTML, only to find that Lotus Notes didn’t understand the styles. The only solution was to either send the email as a huge image - which I disagreed with on semantic principles - or to use tables. I settled for the latter (and hoped that nobody in Websg.org would ever see my emails in circulation).

This worked fine for newsletters sent within the organisation, or to other Government organisations that also used Lotus Notes. However I heard that recipients using a different version of Lotus Notes also did not view the newsletter exactly as it should have looked. It was a pain.

Worse, when we wanted to send our emails to external parties, we discovered that what we saw was not what they got. Our emails turned into gibberish, with broken image links everywhere. We settled for an opening line at the start of each email: “If you cannot view this email, please go to http://nameofsite.com”.

There are discussions over at WASP and Zeldman.com as to whether email’s role should have expanded beyond plain text, but I feel that is beside the point now. HTML emails are here to stay, so we might as well work towards better standards support in email clients.