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Comment by redmorphium | Hacker News Reader

The thing about HTML emails is, different email clients support different things.

It's not HTML5 at all. If you want to do layouts, you must use tables. There are hacky things you have to do to display things correctly across all different types of clients.

You have tools like this: https://buttons.cm/ which generate abominable code for the sake of compatibility.

Also, Outlook uses the Word rendering engine to process HTML. It's janky, at best.

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It's that supposed to be an argument against HTML emails? That some companies choose not to implement it for compatibility? Like, let's stop printing because companies are making proprietary cartridges and breaking compatibility??

Not some companies. All companies, including Google for Gmail, Yahoo for Yahoo mail, Microsoft for Outlook, etc have very limited support for HTML in their HTML rendering engines.

Instead of using floats and margins, you have to revert to using <table> for layouts. Otherwise, your emails just won't render correctly, much of the time.

It's not possible to support HTML fully in Webmail clients, either. Even without scripting, you could write an HTML email that overlays a malicious button on top of Gmail's web interface itself, and it would be too easy to phish people.

That's a confused message you're giving: you don't want the ability to put an ordered list and an image in an email because you can't get pixel-perfect rendering with the (a!) full HTML spec?

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