Big Announcement: EMC Paves the Way for Email Standards
If I stand in front of my monitor and yell “email standards” three times, will they appear?
If you hang out for any length of time in the world of email development, you know the drill. Some clients support interactivity, some clients don’t. Other clients show web fonts, some clients won’t. And then there are the chosen few that don’t support anything and need special code to work.
What if in the future we didn’t need to worry about it anymore?
I’m excited to tell you about a new, community-led initiative. It’s called Email Markup Consortium. The EMC is “working to improve the user experience, accessibility, performance, consistency, and reliability of email markup.”
Led by Hussein Al Hammad, Mark Robbins, and Alice Li, the group aims to work with developers, email tools, and email clients to drive the EMC’s vision forward at every step of the email journey.
Check out an EMC blog post from Hussein to find out even more about the group’s goals and plans.
Here’s what Alice had to say in a press release announcing the new working group:
“From the moment HTML was supported in email, scrappy developers hacked away tirelessly at the simple goal of building beautiful designs for them.
"For decades, we cobbled together deprecated code and imparted verbose markup snippets to each other through disparate backchannels to obtain pixel-perfection in the most obscure email clients. It’s now time to facilitate stronger collaboration between the email community and vendors to improve email standards.”
~ Alice Li, Squarespace/EMC Admin
Of course, she’s absolutely right. We’ve had web standards and software development standards for years, and it’s about time email had the same.
Let’s be honest, Sinch Email on Acid might not even exist if it weren’t for the rendering problems that email clients like Outlook cause. However, we’ve always been big believers in solving email’s biggest challenges. Standards for email development would be a huge step in the right direction.
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How can you get involved?
Visit the Email Markup Consortium's website (emailmarkup.org) and sign up to become a member.
The group will keep you in the loop about what’s ahead and may call on members for ideas and advice. You’ll be supporting an effort to make the inbox a better place for subscribers and make the job of email development a lot less frustrating and a lot more effective. You can also join the conversation about email standards over at GitHub.
In the meantime, keep testing and optimizing every email every time, and do your best to deliver email perfection.
