2007 November | Bainbridge Studios

Purveyors of Pixels Since 2001.™

Links of the Week: November 30th

Friday, November 30th, 2007 | Tom Carmony

Presented in no particular order…

Facebook and Your Privacy
Jeffrey Zeldman on Facebook’s violation of its users’ privacy.

What Makes a Great Design?
Blue Flavor’s D. Keith Robinson on quality design.

The Email Standards Project
Trying to bring better web standards support to email software.

Run Your Company From the Heart
Chuck Longanecker blogs at Found/Read on the importance of truly believing in what you do as an entrepreneur.

So Exactly What Kind of Tagline Does $250,000 Buy You These Days?

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 | Tom Carmony

The Times of London reports on the rather mixed reaction to newly revealed official slogan of Scotland. After more than six months, and £125,000 (approx. $250,000), the Scottish National Party revealed the new marketing slogan:

“Welcome to Scotland.”

“It feels governmental, corporate and static,” said Anita Califano a senior consultant with Wolff Olins.

Of course, one has to be wary of criticism leveled by anyone at Wolff Olins. After all, they’re the agency responsible for the mind-numbing branding of the 2012 London Olympics.

Email Standards Project Works to Improve Web Standards Support in Email Clients

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 | Tom Carmony

Over the past few months, the fine folks at Campaign Monitor have been working on a new project to promote better support of CSS and web standards among major email clients (both offline and web-based programs). The new site for their Email Standards Project (ESP), has now launched and provides a range of helpful information for understanding to what degree various email clients support web standards.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, web standards is a general term for technical specs of website rendering that have been increasingly accepted in recent years. These guidelines, which focus a great deal of attention on support for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, which dictate the look and feel of web page), are designed to help developers of web browsers follow a standard set of protocols for how web pages are seen by users. Long story short, browsers (and websites) that are web-standards client render essentially the same for all users, regardless of their operating system, browser, etc.

Most browsers offer varying degrees of support for CSS and web standards. Among the most standards-compliant browsers are Firefox and Safari. Most lists of the least standards-compliant browsers are typically headed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE5 and IE6 are particularly unfriendly to CSS and web standards — IE7 offers improved support, but still lags behind Firefox, Safari and others).

As much variability exists among browsers, the current state of standards-support in email programs is even worse. What does this mean for the average business? If you send HTML-based emails (emails featuring graphics, different fonts, trackable web links, etc.) you’re taking a bit of a crap shoot as far as how that email will render based on how the recipient is viewing it. HTML email rendering varies greatly, even between different versions of the same program. For instance, Outlook 2003 offered significantly better CSS and standards-support than Outlook 2007. The same email opened in each of these email clients will look different. This variability also extends to web-based email clients (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live/Hotmail, .Mac Mail, and so on).

ESP has devised an acid test for comparing CSS and web standards support among email clients. This test outlines a limited sub-set of CSS tags and classes that would be most commonly used in HTML emails. The current results of these tests can be found on their website and are broken down by major email clients, including Outlook 2007, Apple Mail, Lotus Notes, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail and more.

By highlighting both the strengths and the shortcomings of popular email programs, ESP hopes to call attention to the need for standards support, as well as actively promote such change among software developers.

Making Pre-Flight Instructions Worth Paying Attention To

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 | Tom Carmony

Though there’s only so much variation you can expect in pre-flight safety instructions on commercial airlines these days, Virgin America offers a refreshing and entertaining slant on the typical instructional video.