HTML emails and print style sheets 1

[j4606]

I've been searching for some information on print stylesheets and html emails.
I found one link that was usefull but the comment at the bottom threw me off.

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2006/06/can_i_include_a_print_styleshe.html

I don't know if I wanna run through browser/email client testing for this issue. Does anyone have any information on this subject? Anyone have any information on what email clients can support print stylesheets?

Thanks.

 

[Vragabond]

AFAIK, there's really limited support to CSS in general when it comes to emails and I would rather include a link to a part of the website that was styled as a email message than trying to hard to style the actual email, both for screen and printing.

___________________________________________________________
[small]Do something about world cancer today: Comprehensive cancer control information at PACT[/small]

 

[TheOctagon]

In terms of CSS support, emails are extremely limited. The general practice for broad compatibility is, surprisingly enough, to forgo stylesheets entirely in favor of table-based (and often times deprecated) HTML. This stipulates that you include all of your presentational markup right there in with the content markup (a la mid-to-late 90's web design markup). This, of course, violates several currently accepted web standards and practices; however, it simply cannot be avoided (in the case of reaching total compatibility) as the state of email presentational markup is far from comprehensive.

If you'd like to review some of the tested email clients check out the Email Standards Project:

http://www.email-standards.org/

If you follow the advice of the article that you referenced, including the print stylesheet via the @media rule most likely won't cause any headaches, but apparently isn't supported by all clients.

 

[TheOctagon]

I also failed to mention the following resources for creating HTML emails:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters/

http://mailchimp.blogs.com/blog/2006/01/im_a_web_design.html

They do advocate CSS in some capacity, but always ensure that it degrades gracefully for users on clients that do not support it whatsoever.