Route of Queue

If you’ve ever had to design/build HTML emails for work or fun or whatever, you might have run into a bit of an issue getting your email to display consistently in the multitude of email clients out there. I tend to just test my emails in Gmail, Outlook, Windows Live Hotmail and occasionally Mac Mail.

I used to only test in Windows Live Hotmail using IE as I was resigned to the fact that it never worked properly in Firefox – until now! I finally got hassled into finding a solution for the only issue we had left – a 3 or 4 pixel gap appearing in between all the images.

It turns out the problem is the way the browsers in quirks and standards mode align images to the text baseline – the 3 or 4 pixel gap is there to allow room for the descenders of lowecase letters like “p” and “y” – even if there are no letters in the <td> with the <img> in it.

There are 2 things you can do to resolve the issue – force all the images to be aligned to the bottom of the <td> rather than the default (text baseline):

<img src="something.gif" alt="..." style="vertical-align: bottom;" />

Or you can take the issue out of the rendering engines hands and fool it by making all the images block-level rather than inline:

<img src="something.gif" alt="..." style="display: block;" />

I prefer the second option, but the first one should work fine too! ;)

I’ve been watching/listening to October 07′s FOWA presentations and the latest one I’ve heard – by Yahoo’s Steve Souders – struck me as worth a quick look. Who wouldn’t want to speed up their websites?

Steve describes 14 rules that make up a ‘best practices for speeding up your website’: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

And there’s also a way to use the Firefox add-in, Firebug in combination with YSlow to analyse your sites based on the 14 rules: http://www.getfirebug.com/ and http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

We’ve been planning a css/js cache for a while now, but never got it off the ground, still seems that a few of the other rules could provide a good return on little investment.