working with style sheets
Cascading Style Sheets – a work around
In web page design Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used widely to simplify the coding process and ensure a consistent style throughout a Web site. From extensive testing across a broad range of email clients we have proven that the use of CSS in HTML emails causes significant problems. These problems are summarised in the chart below.
| CSS & Email Clients |
| |
Hotmail |
yahoo |
Gmail |
Outlook |
AOL |
| Linked style sheet |
No
Stripped |
No |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Embedded style (inline)
between head tags |
No
Stripped |
No |
No
Stripped |
Yes |
Yes |
Embedded style (inline)
between body tags |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Testing environment: Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6.0 |
We advise against using any CSS within your HTML. If it is unavoidable we'd advise that you choose the embedded styles also referred to as inline. So simply embed the style within the two body tags and not within the header. You'll find that a number of email clients will truncate or strip out the header, so our recommendation would be to add the style within the body tags.
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