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Unnecessary
Elements
in HTML Email:
In this chapter of our continuing
discussion on HTML email, we are going to talk
about the different elements which are not really
all that necessary in your mailings.
The following are not necessary for
HTML email and should be stripped out before you
mail. This will reduce the overall size of your
mailing and increase the speed in which it is
delivered, rendered, and received by your customers.
While this may not seem like a big deal for a
hundred piece mailing, imagine send 5 million
or so emails in a single day.
<!DOCTYPE
HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
All
Meta Tags, including Refresh Cache & Pragma
Many systems will disable some of these by default,
however when Outlook receives a refresh command
it will merely display blank content in both the
preview and open message. Web-based systems will
usually only display context taken from between
your <BODY></BODY> tags.
<TITLE></TITLE>
The subject section of your email message takes
care of this element.
Long comments or commented
-out sections.
<!--Nuff Said-->
Programs that export
to HTML
Dreamweaver, FrontPage, or Adobe - Any references
to extensions, styles, or Fireworks/Image Ready
tables. This is most common with Front Page extensions,
which reference IE only styles quite often. If
you have a document which uses a library item,
such as Dreamweaver, you will have to break the
library item apart and insert your code as raw
HTML in order for your mailing to work correctly.
Redirects
Since many Web-Based email clients place their
own redirects on your links (for whatever neffarious
reasons..we cannot say) if you place your own
redirects on urls, turls, or query strings, they
may break, or show up as plain text in the middle
of your email.
Extraneous
Style Sheets
Make sure if you use style sheets, only the
elements you will be using for a particular mailing
are included. This helps cut out bulk & unnecessary
code from your mailings. This is most often found
when a mock-up contains the entire style sheet
for a website, rather than the styles used in
the mailing. While this may not seem like a big
deal for a couple hundred emails, it adds up if
your doing, let's say, a Million emails in a day.
So a simple example for extraneuos style sheets
would be if you had 100 lines of code to define
25 styles from your website, but you were only
using one style for your HTML email. You could
either mark up the style in HTML code, or you
could just define one style and apply it to the
entire email.
Special
Characters
You must be mindfull when you use special characters
in you HTML email. Special characters include
those which must be generated through an escape
sequence (ex: © = © in HTML) and
many email browsers will have some trouble reading
them.
One character sequence to be especially careful
of is the non-breaking space character (
). Many WYSIWYG editors (like FrontPage &
Dreamweaver) have fallen in love with this character.
Furthermore, many WYSIWYG editors use the Non-Breaking
space to wedge open <TD>'s. These will usually
close up when viewed by the majority of Netscape
browsers. A spacer GIF should be used when you
absolutely have to keep a <TD> cell open
in order for your design to work.
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