Overclockers UK Newsletter page

two00lbwaster · 25 Apr 2013 at 18:49

I was wondering why, in Firefox, I was getting character replacement of the '£' signs; . So I had a little look :rolleyes:

HTML validator link.

visibleman · 25 Apr 2013 at 18:53

Should edit out your email address

two00lbwaster · 25 Apr 2013 at 18:55

visibleman said:
Should edit out your email address

Ouch, thanks

simisker · 25 Apr 2013 at 21:24

Marketing emails are rarely coded with any craft or thoroughness; OcUK's newsletter is no different to many others in that regard.

It's a fools errand to try and create an email that totally validates, incidentally.

two00lbwaster · 25 Apr 2013 at 22:19

simisker said:
Marketing emails are rarely coded with any craft or thoroughness; OcUK's newsletter is no different to many others in that regard.

It's a fools errand to try and create an email that totally validates, incidentally.

I know that, but they could at least use UTF-8 encoding and put a doctype in there.

ZombieFan · 26 Apr 2013 at 13:06

We send out newsletters like this occasionally. Most of the time you have to avoid doing things the correct way since the html parsing of most email clients is pretty poor. For instance, Outlook (2007 at least) has various problems with divs, therefore it's not uncommon to find tables used for layout.

It would be a waste of time to redo the html just for the web version of the newsletter, so the email version is usually posted up on the site as well.

Oz!asM!dwinter · 26 Apr 2013 at 13:20

HTML rendering across web/desktop clients is widely variable, most don't support background images, some crash if you use image maps, etc. Some versions of Outlook use the Word rendering engine to render HTML emails. A lot of marketing emails use tracking suffixes on links which will render HTML invalid.

englishpremier · 29 Apr 2013 at 13:31

As stated don't expect HTML emails to validate. They involve a lot of workarounds and hacks to display correctly across a range of clients. Most notably Outlook 07+, gmail, and Yahoo. No one really bothers with Notes, and Blackberry compatibility too much.

two00lbwaster · 29 Apr 2013 at 17:25

I don't think that a doctype would hurt that much though. UTF-8 encoding?

For some reason, the charset is set to Western Europe in the HTML meta tag, however, the validator was picking it up as UTF-8 and I've seen similar issues recently where you get odd characters instead of £ signs when you use a mix of iso-8859-1 codepage with UTF-8 charset. This seems to be the other way around with the same result.

ZombieFan · 29 Apr 2013 at 22:32

Realisticly though, someone in marketting wanted a quick newsletter to be put together and someone else knocked up a quick bit of html for the newsletter.

It's just a temporary newsletter, and probably needed to be done quickly so it could be sent out to customers asap. Once done, I doubt anyone will ever revisit the html again (unless there is an error in the content). Don't get hung up on it