Monday, October 1st, 2007
Category: CSS
, Email
Glen Lipka has been frustrated with the task of producing quality HTML email that works across various email clients, which of course got even harder when Outlook 2007 took email design back a few years.
Anyway, Glen thinks that he nailed it:
Outlook 2007 actually has a little more CSS support than I thought. Just because I don’t get positioning and float and a decent DIV or the right box model or margins, doesn’t mean that I can’t still make it work. Using a couple of tables, borders, padding and width, I think I came up with a solid solution that still looks like clean html. I refuse to use spacer.gif. Spacer.gif can kiss my shiny metal ass. Boo spacer! As a side note, I sometimes interview web developers for positions. I look at their html. If I see spacer.gif I say, “Nope, they stinkâ€Â. Sorry, it’s a pet peeve. Opening up your email html in Word 2007 is NOT the same thing as opening up your html as an email in Outlook 2007. They are really really close, but they have differences. I kept seeing them, so I stopped trying to use Word 2007. There is a bug in Outlook 2007. If you have a table, and each cell has padding of 10px and then you put a cell in the middle to be 0px, it shortens the height of the cell and basically makes a HOLE in your table. I was dumbstruck by this one. It seemed impossible to do, but it does it. The fix is to keep the padding on top and bottom, but remove left and right. The bug is related to height, not to width. It shortens vertically, but not horizontally. Gmail is evil. They only allow inline CSS. They do this to avoid overlapping CSS rules. They could have dealt with overlap CSS rules using a rewrite scheme that put a prefix in front of all the classes. It just made the html really messy. I did my best in my template above to make it clean. But still, that’s lame. Gmail strips all height css rules. Why height?? What did height ever do to them? I got around this problem using padding, but in the dynamic app, it means we need to calculate specific padding rules based on the height the user requested minus the height of existing content. Not trivial, but doable. Why does Gmail allow width? What’s the deal with height? Borders can not be defined as 0px width. In Outlook 2007, if you declare a border as 0px width, it shows up anyway. I couldn’t figure that out, so I said, “Ok, I won’t do that.†I saved an example which works in the browser, but not Outlook 2007. Divs can have borders, but not padding in Outlook 2007. Why not Microsoft? Come on, work with me here. Meet me halfway. YUCK!
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
Category: Business, Calendar, Email, Google, Office, Showcase
From the You-Know-When-Ajax-Has-Gone-Mainstream-Dept, Google announced today it will be offering businesses a premium service for its key productivity applications, at $50/user/year. The package includes:
Access to office-style applications - Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator. No presentation package yet - perhaps Google should acquire S5 :-). Access to communication applications - GMail (@your-own-domain), Google Calendar, Google Talk (voice/IM). Access to Google Homepage (maybe corporations could deck this out to become their intranet homepage?) Control panel to manage the domain Ads can be turned off Storage at 10GB/user Integration with organisation’s sign-on and email infrastructure Phone support
The apps themselves are available to anyone, but the integration and extra services come with the premium service. Google provides this comparison table.
The giant elephant in this room is your company’s data sitting on Google’s servers. In the absence of an “Apps Appliance” sitting inside the firewall, there will always be a major proportion of the market unwilling to commit to a solution like this - increased risk of data loss, theft, and manipulation. Google’s pure-external model keeps things nice and simple, but it’s not for everyone.
Zoho, for example, offers “in-premise edition” to run inside an organization’s network. Similarly, Zimbra’s collaboration app. It’s also becoming possible to make your own stack, with apps like Wikicalc and the various wikis, though nothing as comprehensive as Google’s offering. It’s feasible MS will move their apps in that direction too.
The comparison among these approaches will be worth watching in coming months. For now, though, it’s great to see how much Ajax and the web has evolved in the past two years, with Google providing a lot of the inspiration. From TechCrunch: “Beyond competition and concerns, tonight is a good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation that Google is as well. Its nearly full-service suite of sophisticated, integrated online services is something of historic proportion.”
Thursday, September 14th, 2006
Category: Email, Showcase, Yahoo!
Yahoo! Mail’s big-time Ajax upgrade finally goes live today (via TechCrunch). True to the times, it’s still a “Beta”, but it’s now open to the general public in the US and 18 international markets (from ReadWriteWeb). The company acquired Oddpost - a key inspiration for the new interface - two years ago, not long after the ominous release of GMail. The Ajax interface went into limited Beta a year ago.
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ajaxian.com%2Farchives%2Fyahoo-mail-beta.png)
Features:
Desktop-like look-and-feel (similar to Outlook) Drag-and-drop UI Tabbed interface for multiple emails Calendar, integrated with Yahoo! Maps RSS Reader
ReadWriteWeb walks through the interface and has a podcast interview with Yahoo! Mail’s Ethan Diamond.
Thursday, September 15th, 2005
Category: Email
Yahoo! Mail is finally about to start a beta with some of its users. The new version is the fruit of the Oddpost acquisition, and it has a very clean look to it.
Yahoo imported most of the changes from Oddpost, an e-mail startup the company bought for an undisclosed amount last year.
With its changes, Yahoo’s e-mail will look more like a traditional inbox that operates through a software program installed on a computer hard drive instead of being hosted on the Internet. Yet Yahoo’s redesigned service still relies on a Web browser and won’t require its users to install anything on their computers.
Using “dynamic” html, Yahoo’s e-mail accounts will feature an inbox containing all e-mails on the top of the page with a separate pane for reading e-mail below it. The feature is meant to enable users to scroll through an e-mail folder without having to click back and forth between Web pages.
Yahoo’s test audience also will use a computer mouse to “drag and drop” e-mails from one folder to another and search all the content, including attachments, stored in the inbox.
“Our competition has been doing some interesting things in e-mail, but we think we have leapfrogged them all with all these new features,” said Ethan Diamond, an Oddpost co-founder who works for Yahoo as a director of product management.
Zilla Smash got to check out the app and discusses their opinions
Saturday, September 10th, 2005
Category: Email, Showcase
Just today, someone was asking why there wasn’t an open source ajaxian email system. Now there is with Zimbra.
Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology. Currently, this technology is available as a beta version. At Zimbra, our goal is to make e-mail, calendar, contacts and other communications technologies the best they can be. We believe that by opening the technology to the community we will insure that we can maximize innovation, scale and the ability to co-exist with existing messaging systems.
Try the hosted demo
Too lazy for that and want to see someone else walk you through it? (Flash movie)
Downloads
JS/Ajax Toolkit PDF
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