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Comment by crisnoble | Hacker News Reader

Anyone brave enough to bring a semblance of sanity to the world of HTML emails deserves major kudos. For kids like me who did not grow up making table layouts, coding emails is a nightmare. Oh the <td>'s. I am so glad Zurb is lending their knowledge building of excellent frameworks to this widely underserved market.

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I never needed to get into table hell. I used an image map every time. One image. Define some areas with different links. Bingo.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ma...

Except you would most likely have a high rate spam rate and a major number of recipients won't be able to see your content without downloading images first.

You will get a better response with a text only message.

So what do the majority of recipients see (who don't have images load by default)?

Um, I'm pretty sure he was joking.

shrug

Quite a few people do exactly that.

LOTS of game related companies use the "image map" method because, as we all know, games are audio/visually awesome and cannot possibly be represented by plain text emails.

In my case the result is: Big red placeholder image and copyright text /unsubscribe link underneath it.

and alert saying "There are images in the mail that have been blocked for your safety." and an option "Unblock Content"

This might work for one off emails where your user base is expecting it. But try to A/B test the headline, or better yet customize it for each subscriber, now you have to make many variations in photoshop -> export -> map -> send. You could imagine this getting out of hand fast.

If you get a HTML template you can use mailchimp or exact target to put custom html to each subscriber / subset and do A/B tests. It takes more time up front, and limits what you can do (er outlook / gmail limits that) but if you get it right it will pay off down the line.

How does it work in Gmail / Yahoo etc where images are blocked ?

This was pre-image blocking. Not sure how this would work now.

I assume there's a big empty table where the image would go and some text+links above and below the image.

Honestly, even for someone that started his career making table HTML layouts with inline styling it's a major PITA to code up emails that look respectable on all clients. I can't wait to try this out.

If you are programatically generating emails, there are libraries for most popular languages that will convert an external stylesheet into inline styles - for example, pynliner [1] for Python.

They let you write HTML and CSS, test in the browser, and only at the last moment convert `p { text-color: #333 }` and `<p>..</p>` to `<p style="color: #333">`

[1] https://github.com/rennat/pynliner

I spent a ton of my childhood building HTML table layouts, especially forum skins. Maybe it's because I'm now spoiled by lovely CSS and established web standards, but the thought of coding any HTML email up makes me sick.

Huh. While I rarely use them nowadays, I still find tables much easier than divs.

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