Question

Can i insert CSS style sheet within the Body tags (not inline the whole code)

Asked by: YohanF

Can I insert a style sheet within the body tags, the reason is I do loads of email marketing and I heard the header tags are usually stripped from email browsers.

So I am thinking if I define the style sheet with in the body it will get pass that bareer, plus save LOADS of TEDIOUS work for me by not having to use Inline style sheets.

Is this a possibility, has anyone done this and is it working ?

Thanks all help and tips appreciated..

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Asked On
2009-10-28 at 03:17:54ID24850240
Tags

CSS

,

HTML

,

Email Marketing

Topics

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

,

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

,

Internet Marketing

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: BazzeFTWPosted on 2009-10-28 at 03:41:00ID: 25681642

Some browser might allow it but according to w3 it goes just inside the head tag, and nowhere else (http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/styles.html#edef-STYLE).

"HTML permits any number of  STYLE elements in the HEAD section of a document."

 

by: YohanFPosted on 2009-10-28 at 04:14:48ID: 25681899

True, that is the convention. I wonder whether anyone has gone beyond that and tried things.. Specially in HTML email designing side.

 

by: gwkgPosted on 2009-10-28 at 12:31:04ID: 25687242

Contrary to modern html best practices, you should design html emails with inline css and tables.  Gmail ignores all external and embedded style sheets.

Here are some tips: http://www.onenw.org/toolkit/guidelines-for-css-and-email-newsletters/

Here is what Outlook 2007 supports: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx

And it doesn't look much better for Outlook 2010 http://news.softpedia.com/news/Outlook-2010-Will-Use-Word-2010-Rendering-Engine-for-HTML-115115.shtml

 

by: qaljimmyPosted on 2009-10-28 at 15:55:47ID: 25689136

Also some extra resources on email HTML&CSS. Helped me a lot in the past:
- http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters
- http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

On a sidenote, I totally agree with gwkg regarding the use of embedded and linked stylesheets for HTML emails. Not only google, but (not sure about now) most webmails tend to remove the <link> and <style> and <script> tags for obvious security reasons.

 

by: YohanFPosted on 2009-11-07 at 07:13:08ID: 31646873

Thanks guys, sorry for taking time to respond...

 

by: qaljimmyPosted on 2009-11-07 at 07:41:57ID: 25766628

On a sidenote, as frustrating as it may seem, using inline CSS doesn't have to be hard to use if you're using some sort of serverside scripting problem to render the email HTML document. One thing I experimented a few months ago and worked like a charm:
-using the serverside scripting language (PHP in my case), I chose to declare some string-like variables with  proper naming, i.e. $css_header, $css_header_logo, and so on.
-in the actual HTML output, instead of spitting out endless walls of CSS code, you just echo the previously defined variable like this: style=\"{$css_header}\"
-one downside to this approach: it's a pain to try and use CSS selectors. On the other hand, that's a general problem when using inline styling anyway.

Hope this extra tip works in case you use some serverside scripting program

 

by: YohanFPosted on 2009-11-07 at 07:49:45ID: 25766675

thanks galjimmy... nice one...

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