Inbox 2.0 - Email Standards
Posted by Luke Humble
With Web 2.0 in full throttle and the need for increased accessibility of websites, the time has come to focus this attention on emails.
Emails are the strongest communication tool that exists today. The majority of any companies b2b, b2c can start, develop and end with emails. They are kept as a record of agreements and conversations from individuals and companies both in the form of just plain text conversation and/or with the use of attached files such as quotes, invoices or product sheets.
If you were to take a look at the last 12 months worth of emails that you have both sent and received you would notice that there is a very large percentage that are business related and have generated either some sort of income for you or have resulted in your purchasing a product or service.
It is because of this that emails are so important and this is only for business communication and thanks to the internet, the entire world is heavily connected together. This means communicating with family members and friends through the internet (more specifically emails) has become part of day-to-day life as well.
So suddenly you can see the importance of email in our lives. Because of this and the drive for accessibility backed by Web 2.0, the time has come to look at emails; their formats and their accessibility. This is where the “Email Standards Project” steps in. The Emails Standards Project was setup to work directly with email client developers to ensure that emails displayed correctly. This means that emails will display correctly no matter which email client you use (Yahoo! Mail, GMail, Microsoft Outlook and so forth). It is a community run project coordinated by 3 individuals (more details about the email standards project can be found here).
Emails are important and thanks to the likes of the Email Standards Project they are now getting the attention they deserve and hopefully the email of the future will more comfortable in our inbox.
http://www.email-standards.org
Browser vs Designer
Posted by Luke Humble
Any web designer will tell you that the hardest part of their job (apart from dealing with clients and feature creaping) is making sure the site displays properly in all major browsers. The reason this task is the trickiest is due to the fact that there are so many different browsers knocking about in the internet and they are only starting to become fully compliant with W3C guidelines such as CSS and HTML. Aside from these issues, it is easy to install different web browsers on your computer, but not so easy to have multiple version running at the same time on the same machine. There are solutions out there, albeit rather techy solutions such as “Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image” which allows you to have Internet Explorer 6 and 7 running at the same time but only on Windows XP SP2!
Step in Browser Shots!
Browser Shots allows designers to view their site designs not only in different browsers, but in different versions of those browsers (including beta versions) as well as different operating system environments. This is truely a godsend for designers around the world who are face with the pitfalls of the browser compliancy wars.
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