{"id":6566,"date":"2015-11-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.litmus.com\/blog\/will-we-ever-have-email-coding-standards\/"},"modified":"2020-04-21T21:10:38","modified_gmt":"2020-04-21T21:10:38","slug":"will-we-ever-have-email-coding-standards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.litmus.com\/blog\/will-we-ever-have-email-coding-standards","title":{"rendered":"Will We Ever Have Email Coding Standards? [Video]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Email\u2019s greatest strength is that it\u2019s an open platform that no one company controls. That\u2019s also its greatest weakness, leading to inconsistencies in deliverability and rendering. The latter is the bane of email designers\u2019 existence.<\/p>\n<p>Because inconsistent coding support makes designing emails so cumbersome, we asked marketers if they thought there will <strong>ever<\/strong> be a generally accepted set of email coding standards. It\u2019s worth noting that we considered putting a timeframe on the question, such as within the next 5 or 10 years, but decided to leave it open-ended to get the most optimistic response possible.<\/p>\n<p>Even given the infinite time parameter, marketers were slightly more optimistic than we anticipated, with nearly 2 out of 5 saying there would eventually, someday in the future be email standards.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"post-11150 media-11150\" class=\"aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.litmus.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/poll-chart-will-there-ever-be-coding-standards-1.png\" alt=\"POLL-chart-will-there-ever-be-coding-standards-1\"><\/figure>\n<p>We asked this same question of five of our speakers from The Email Design Conference, but also inquired as to what might turn the tide toward having standards like web developers do.<\/p>\n<p>As you\u2019d probably expect, the major impediments to standards were seen as Microsoft and Google\u2014which FreshInbox email developer Justin Khoo recently implored to support <em>style<\/em> tags and @media queries, and to be more consistent across its various web and mobile email clients in this <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2015\/11\/10\/gmail-we-need-to-talk\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TechCrunch article<\/a>. However, some of our experts felt the issue went well beyond the Outlook and Gmail properties.<\/p>\n<p>You can watch the full interview here, or read a transcript of it below.<\/p>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/fast.wistia.com\/assets\/external\/E-v1.js\"><\/script><\/p>\n<div class=\"wistia_embed wistia_async_usdjjtw7fv\" style=\"height:293px;width:520px\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<h2>Dan Denney, Front-End Developer, Code School<\/h2>\n<p>So I don\u2019t think that we\u2019ll ever have email standards because the technology and the needs outpace anything that we can keep up with. For standards, you need to be able to plan out how things are going to evolve a little bit over time and then review the needs as they are.<\/p>\n<p>Email\u2019s too fast. We have the watch now. We have the Internet of Things. We have all these things coming where people want their messages fast and we have to figure out some way to generate them. Data changes. Delivery changes. Everything changes so fast, it would almost be a waste of time to go backwards and try and standardize it afterwards.<\/p>\n<h2>Fabio Carneiro, Lead Email Developer and UX Designer, MailChimp<\/h2>\n<p>When I talk to people about Microsoft Outlook, especially the desktop version, and they\u2019re like, \u201cOh, when\u2019s it going to change, you know, and when are they finally going to start supporting modern code?\u201d I tell people, \u201cDon\u2019t hold your breath.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Simply because Outlook, the desktop app, is part of the Office Suite, which is like Microsoft\u2019s bread and butter as far as software goes, and so they\u2019re going to be loath to change it. And even if they flip the switch and change it tomorrow, there\u2019s going to be years of lag before subscribers catch up.<\/p>\n<h2>Mike Ragan, Designer, Action Rocket<\/h2>\n<p>It\u2019s really difficult and it\u2019s a huge challenge. The main possible tipping point would be if Gmail changes its attitude. That\u2019s the long and short of it. I know that Gmail isn\u2019t going to like that, but they don\u2019t seem to care, but I think that they probably do.<\/p>\n<p>But Gmail, they\u2019re a huge mail client, and they\u2019re going to keep going on and on and on. It cannot be ignored. But they are the reason why we have to change the way we code things.<\/p>\n<p>Outlook used to be the main problem, but Gmail\u2019s actually the real concern because we can\u2019t enhance. Outlook has its own language that we can use to sort of separate it off. We can sort of account for Outlook so actually Outlook is fine because we can give them a separate serving. But Gmail, no. It\u2019s very\u2026uncooperative\u2026as a rendering engine, I think. So that\u2019s what would have to change in order to precipitate some kind of standards.<\/p>\n<h2>Mark Robbins, Email Developer, RebelMail<\/h2>\n<p>I think there will be standards, but it\u2019s a case of understanding a rendering engine. So having a standardized rendering engine of everybody uses this WebKit rendering engine to process their emails, if that\u2019s become standard or they create a new engine specifically for emails, then that could be a standard.<\/p>\n<p>At the moment, using WebKit, using (ugh) Microsoft Word, and various other things\u2014processes just taking bits out and adding bits to the code and messing around with it\u2014that\u2019s not a place that\u2019s going to evolve very easily. I think we need one common standard rendering, which everything can work off the back of that.<\/p>\n<h2>Brian Graves, UI Team Lead, DEG<\/h2>\n<p>Really honestly the catalyst that\u2019s going to allow us to get to the point where we have email standards is mobile. It\u2019s already kind of taking hold. Some of the clients that aren\u2019t supporting the standards yet are ones like Outlook, which I think the desktop versions of those are going to fade out of prominence a little bit more. And the new versions of Outlook and their apps on mobile phones do take advantage of WebKit and those types of things that do follow standards much more closely.<\/p>\n<p>Gmail is obviously still a problem, but they\u2019ve expressed interest in working closer with the standard as well. So I think Gmail is the main hurdle honestly, not Microsoft, but hopefully we can make progress there and get some form of standards going<\/p>\n<h2>More Expert Videos<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><a rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/litmus.com\/blog\/speed-up-your-email-production-process-with-task-runners-and-static-site-generators-video\">Speed Up Your Email Production Process with Task Runners and Static Site Generators<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/litmus.com\/blog\/the-future-of-email-marketing-video?campaign=email2020&amp;utm_source=litmusblog&amp;utm_medium=blog\">The Future of Email Marketing<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/litmus.com\/blog\/gaining-email-marketing-insights-from-big-data-video?utm_campaign=bestpractices_bigdata&amp;utm_source=litmusblog&amp;utm_medium=blog\">Gaining Email Marketing Insights from Big Data<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/litmus.com\/blog\/achieving-better-performance-with-email-segmentation-personalization-video?utm_campaign=bestpractices_bigdata&amp;utm_source=litmusblog&amp;utm_medium=blog\">Achieving Better Performance with Email Segmentation &amp; Personalization<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/litmus.com\/blog\/email-marketing-success-metrics-vary-by-subscriber-video?utm_campaign=bestpractices_emailmetrics&amp;utm_source=litmusblog&amp;utm_medium=blog\">Email Marketing Success Metrics Vary by Subscriber<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/litmus.com\/blog\/the-pitfalls-of-email-marketing-metrics-ab-testing-video?utm_campaign=bestpractices_emailmetrics&amp;utm_source=litmusblog&amp;utm_medium=blog\">The Pitfalls of Email Marketing Metrics &amp; A\/B Testing<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/litmus.com\/blog\/email-marketing-in-the-age-of-data-breaches-tightening-regulations-video?utm_campaign=bestpractices_emailmetrics&amp;utm_source=litmusblog&amp;utm_medium=blog\">Email Marketing in the Age of Data Breaches &amp; Tightening Regulations<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>What Do You Think?<\/h2>\n<p>Do you think we\u2019ll ever have email coding standards? And, if so, what do you think will be the catalyst? Let us know by joining the conversation about this over in the Litmus Community.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"orange btn medium\" style=\"color: #fff;font-weight: bold\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/litmus.com\/community\/discussions\/4543-do-you-think-we-ll-ever-have-standards-for-coding-emails?utm_campaign=observations_codingstandards&amp;utm_source=litmusblog&amp;utm_medium=blog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Join the conversation \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We asked this question of five of our speakers from The Email Design Conference, in addition to asking it of nearly 4,000 marketers. Here&#8217;s what they said&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[106,1575],"blog_category":[57],"class_list":["post-6566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-gmail","tag-rendering","blog_category-observations"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.5 (Yoast SEO v27.7) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Will We Ever Have Email Coding Standards? [Video] - Litmus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We asked this question of five of our speakers from The Email Design Conference, in addition to asking it of nearly 4,000 marketers. 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