digitallblog.com

As an advocate of web standards, it is continually frustrating to have to develop HTML emails in technology which is over 5 years old. The support for CSS within emails had been steadily improving over the last few years. That is until Outlook 2007. But Microsoft are not the only culprits. Indeed Google’s Gmail, and Lotus Notes, both of which have a high amount of users, also provide bad support. These are the findings of a new online campaign, The Email Standards Project whose aim it is to put pressure on companies like Microsoft and Google to improve their support for Email standards and make life easier for developers, reducing the load on servers and improving accessibility, in turn making email production cheaper for marketing companies, and ISPs. Already at 100,000 visits in 18 hours, this project has a lot of support, and I for one am behind it. So spread the word!

Flash penetration is tricky thing to gage. Although it’s probably the most common browser plug-in in existence I am always wary about new versions and users who are unable to upgrade due to locked down admin rights. Adobe’s stats on the matter always seem a little optimistic, and their site admits that although the stats are taken from a wide demographic it is not necessarily representative of the region as a whole. Indeed, it seems only a couple of hundred people where surveyed for the UK.Taking a look at stats for our own sites reveals a variety of level of support for Flash 9 over approximately 135,000 users:

• Website 1 - 89%
• Website 2 - 84%
  
• Website 3 - 85%
  
• Website 4 - 90%
• Website 5 - 82%
  
• Website 6 - 88%
  
• Website 7 - 94%
  

Not surprisingly the differing nature of the sites results in different percentages (a men’s deodorant website having the highest 94%, a health food site having the lowest 82%), but at this point in time the take up looks lower than Adobe suggests. Personally I’m going to remain cautious. Flash 9 has some great features but if 1 person in 10 can’t access the site it’s not worth it… yet.