Five by Five

I was catching up on a bit of reading this week when I stumbled across an article that for me gives a prime example of the importance of accessibility. This particular case was focussed on a feature which is referred to in the game as “progressive enhancement”. A recent trend in web development circles has been to implement what many people refer to as web 2.0 features to enhance a user’s experience of a site. In essence it should be about adding bells and whistles to features within your site with the overall aim of improving a user’s experience.

From a developers point of view this is a bit of a double edge sword. We love implementing features using cutting edge techniques but our sensible side always has to think about the “what if” situations. What if the user doesn’t have JavaScript turned on, what if the JavaScript fails to load correctly. We get over this hurdle by using the progressive enhancement technique, this means getting a feature to work without the bells and whistles then adding them in such a way that if they weren’t there the feature would still work. This obviously adds to development time and as developers you often have the feeling of is this worth it? I mean really how often as a percent will the non-enhanced version be used?

Well the answer of course is yes it is worth it and this article sums up to me why it is worth it. This details one customers woes when an enhanced feature went wrong which could have ended up causing him pain. Instead he was able to fall back to the non-enhanced implementation and continued to be a happy customer.

Having played and worked with internet technologies for over a decade I thought the bad old days were coming to an end. After 5 years Microsoft had finally released an update to their flagship browser Internet Explorer. Whilst not perfect IE7 is definitely a step forward in terms standards compliance. Now this may not mean much to the lay-person but to my development team and I it was music to our ears. Standard compliance put simply means we can develop to this standard safe in the knowledge that most browsers will display the work we create in the same way.

Happy times ahead it seemed, well apparently no. It seems with Microsoft us developers are doomed not to have an easy life. For although they have taken a tentative step forward with IE7 they have taken a huge step backwards with their imminent release of Outlook 2007.

Without getting too technical, previous releases of Outlook have always used IE as their rendering engine, in other words if a HTML email looked correct in IE you could guarantee it would look the same in Outlook. Now in their wisdom they have decided to change this in the next release of Outlook, instead of using IE, essentially Outlook will be using Word to render HTML content.

So when I say this is a big step back it really is, and whilst I understand some of the reasoning behind this move, it still heralds some interesting times ahead. At Five by Five we have consistently been producing creative yet effective email campaigns for many years, so as an experienced team we know what worked and what didn’t. Using our extensive back catalogue of email campaigns as testing material I have been testing a range of emails. The results were, well to put it mildly, horrendous. At best the emails were slightly broken, in some cases so garbled it was almost funny.

So it looks like, in both development and design, with HTML emails it will be back to basics.

Further Reading:

• Microsoft takes email design back 5 years
• Broken HTML/CSS Rendering in Outlook 2007
• What Really Happened with HTML and CSS in Outlook 2007