That's you're problem, you're using div as a replacement for tags, and that's not web development, web design, or has anything to do with standards, in any way.

I create unique newsletters for clients on a monthly if not weekly basis (kamalaspa.com is an example), and yes many of the online web applications and desktop apps are years behind -- but that's not an excuse for crap coding practices.

You can use tables, you can use semantic elements in a clean proper fashion and have them display, universally, accepted between applications. I've done it -- it's about knowing your code and understanding it. For the most part i'm stuck with doing inline CSS because yahoo and hotmail destroy anything above the head closing tag, but with the caveat that I know positioning affects (and floats included), and image replacement techniques will most likely bomb; everything else is fair game.

So yes, you won't get full modern standards -- but you don't have to create an infested html loaded with font tags, break tags (which there should be no reason to use anyhow -- if you have to do a line break, close the tag and open a new one, control it with your css), hr tags, and multiple tables inside of divs inside of tables. Ebay's email is a horrendous, dated html coded most likely because they have a newsletter CMS system that works ok, so who cares (regardless if it will never work for a handicap user that receives it in his/her email address)

This isn't meant as rude, but your website isn't an example of someone who has experience with web standards either -- I see a spacer gif, tables mixed with div's, style elements in your html that should be css, dreamweaver onload functions, no doctype, no character set, not one semantic element, no alt tag on your images... lots. If this is an example of your experience with standards, you don't have experience with standards -- and you're coding websites circa 1997 style; so how do you know what modern standards work and don't work? If I don't see it in your website, I would assume I wouldn't see it in email designs.

This is something I don't see as part of the developers list anyhow -- htmldog.com has excellent tutorials on proper html and css coding, many of us teach coding practices (me, Andrew my developer from leftjustified.net, brothercake.com is there, and quite a few others) online for free or answer questions at codingforums.com -- all this information is free, there's no excuse to learn how to do it.

to go full circle, email coding will need to be old until email clients catchup -- but not that old and bloated, by far.


Brady J. Frey
Creative Director // dotfive


Tony Zielinski wrote: 
Brady,

I beg to differ with your opinion of the eBay HTML email that he Stefan Ott
attached.  You say that it was coded using old standards, I'm sure you're
right, but for a good reason.  I tried using <div> tags for layout instead
of <table> tags with horrendous display in RoundCube.  It looked good in
other clients. I submitted a post about this earlier to the dev list, but no
one responded.

Not related to RoundCube, but try coding all design and layout using a
stylesheet with no inline HTML attributes and viewing it in gmail or other
another popular webmail.  Outlook and AppleMail display the output okay for
the most part, except the links don't get the same treatment that they would
in IE or FireFox... For real kicks, try kMail for KDE.  

I always code my HTML email pages plain vanilla HTML 2.0 circa 1995 fashion
for the above reasons.  Using 'style' attributes inline with HTML tags seems
to work okay in the clients I've tested as well as long as you don't use
'class' or 'id' attributes it seems to work well.

--
Tony Zielinski

-----Original Message-----
From: Brady J. Frey [mailto:brady@dotfive.com] 
Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2006 8:35 AM
To: Stefan Ott
Cc: dev@lists.roundcube.net; users@lists.roundcube.net
Subject: Re: HTML E-Mails from eBay

Stefan Ott wrote:
  
Hi,

I use Roundcube 0.1beta and I have problems with E-Mails from eBay. I only
get a blank page, with all other html mails it works. I attached the
    
source
  
of an eBay mail maybe someone can figure it out what causes this problem.

Thanks
steve`

  
    
Aside from the fact that, even for HTML email which is behind the 
standards times, that HTML looks like a 5 year old coded it -- the 
rendering of all html is based on  the browser you are using -- what 
browser is that?