fcarneiro / tedc15_template

All of the code I covered in my TEDC15 talk, Resposive Email Without Media Queries.

The Email Design Conference 2015 // #TEDC15

Developing email that’s flexible enough to adapt to the large number of clients that exist—new and old—can be a challenge. Some clients, like Microsoft Outlook, have outdated and poor-performing rendering engines. Others, like Gmail, have user bases that can’t be ignored, but render emails terribly.

This code is an illustration of the concepts of Spongy Development (a.k.a Hybrid Coding) and Pattern-based Design (a.k.a Atomic Design). It's all built in modular fashion, with the aim of providing baseline code for robust, flexibly-built emails that perform well and are “responsive” across a variety of clients without relying on media queries or other modern development techniques.

This is all of the code I covered in my talk, Resposive Email Without Media Queries, and it was put together pretty quickly, which means there may be some rough edges here and there; I'll fix issues as I find them, and will push the optimized to this repository for a few more days.

Hope you find it helpful in your own work!

Cheers,

Fabio Carneiro
MailChimp
flcarneiro.com
@flcarneiro

---

Additional resources:

My original ideas have been refined, reworked and made better by others in the email design community and, in turn, pushed me to do better work. In particular...

Mike Ragan, at Action Rocket, has written about Hybrid Coding on Action Rocket Labs:

• The Hybrid Coding Approach
• Hybrid Coding Redux

Nicole Merlin, at Email Wizardry, has written about the same concept on Tuts+:

• Creating Future-proof Responsive Email

---

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2015 Fabio Carneiro

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

tedc15_template's Issues

MSO Conditional Code for older Outlook

Hi Fabio,

Thanks for sharing this code from your TEDC talk! I have a question about the MSO conditional code. Should it be updated to include older versions of Outlook?

From...

<!--[if mso]>

To...

<!--[if (mso)|(IE)]>

Thanks!

improved "pure HTML" support

In italy we have webmails stripping not only <style> tags but also style attributes.
I found that using this

<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="660" style="width: 100%; max-width:660px;">

instead of

<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" style="max-width:660px;">

gives better results because otherwise the main table grow to 100% and the content slip away.

So, if you don't support CSS then the table will be 660 fixed, if you support CSS then it will be width: 100% and max-width: 660px.

The same applies to other 100% tables.

We also use cellspacing="10" attribute combined with style="border-spacing: 10px; border-collapse: separate" to get fully compatible "padding" in those <table>s.