So, we are not allowed to use <font> tags anymore right?
Yea I thought the same thing, However, if your site is designed in HTML 4 <font> tags are still going fine??
Deprecated as it may be, the font tag is still the only thing that works universally across pretty much all email clients, old and new. Bear in mind that email is not the web and it's still positively antediluvian. Some email services do unspeakable things; I've encountered one that blindly stripped all HTML tags (ignoring provided plain-text versions), and converted linked images to attachments, resulting in an unreadable mess. Even contemplating having inline styles working in the face of such vandalism is truly wishful.
Want to know where the big hole is? Hotmail. Hotmail, live.com, and outlook.com strip or replace inline styles, yes, started as far back as 2013. Blame Microsoft, Hotmail, live, outlook.com, and outlook. They have all gotten considerably worse over the years (e.g. floats were dropped from outlook.com 10 years ago, outlook dropped background images in 2007, and they've not been seen since).
Inline styles work in Gmail, but it strips anything outside the body tag. Some corporate mail filters (like BlackSpider/WebSense) do exactly the opposite, so if you want to be completely sure about your styling, you need to put a style tag in the head tag, another copy of it within the body (invalid, but it works), the same styles inline (look at the premailer project), and finally the same styling using font tags. Yes, it's insane, but no amount of wishing is going to make the problem go away. You can of course drop some of these, but by doing so you're implicitly accepting that it's not going to look the same in some places. You need to look at your audience - a new mobile music site can probably get away with it, but a corporate pension provider probably needs to be living in 2003 font-tag land.
Fortunately, Apple Mail, iOS Mail, and iCloud all have vastly superior HTML handling as their Campaign Monitor table shows, as does the email standards project. With the majority of mobile reading using some flavor of WebKit, rendering on mobile is generally much more consistent (and mostly better) which sucks because most of us can afford desktops and use them on the daily.
You could simply say that it's not worth the effort - anyone using crappy mail readers clearly doesn't care that much what their email looks like, but that doesn't mean that your styling isn't going to break.
The old FONT tag is needed to achieve some email styling, for example changing the color of an anchor is something that is hard in different email clients, this will not work well in some clients:
<a href="url-here"style="color:orange">click here</a> but this will work in most all the cases: <a href="url-here"><font color="green">click here</font></a>.
I say all these companies and developers need to move with the time and fix all this so inline styling is all that will be needed!
Holy shit, why are all HTML/e-mail developers and companies stuck in 2003?
Sincerely,
Ernest Allen Buffington
Data Scientist / Programmer name: Ernest Allen Buffington email: ernest.buffington[at]gmail.com www: https://theghost.86it.us github: https://github.com/ernestbuffington |