The Circle of Standards A blog about standards, style guidelines, & best practices for the Web.

Coding HTML emails is rarely regarded as a fun task, but these articles may help take some of the guesswork out of the task.

Sitepoint author Tim Slavin offers four steps (each with many details) to coding a better solution in How to Code HTML Email Newsletters.

Campaign Monitor provides an updated Guide to CSS Support in Email Clients for 2008. Their matrices thoroughly detail CSS support in both desktop and web clients, 21 in total.

Standards Suck is a podcast show/blog by Anne van Kesteren, Marcos Caceres, and Lachlan Hunt.

So far, the topics covered include WCAG 2.0, the Selectors API, and ARIA in HTML5. However, they haven’t explained why they think that standards suck. I guess we’re supposed to gather that from the complexities of what’s discussed.

Jon Sykes has investigated the performance of child selectors in a series of tests. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

While his findings show that type and class selectors are rendered more rapidly than descendant and child selectors, the example files are (necessarily) exaggerated in order to demonstrate the performance impact.

I’d like to see a well-coded, real-world example (one which balances type, class, and ID selectors with descendant and child selectors) vs. an example that exploits the use of class selectors (and is probably less efficient over all due to excess code) — I would guess that they’d perform about the same. And, as pointed out elsewhere, the well-coded solution will be easier to maintain in the long run, which would well be worth the extra milliseconds on the client.

Don’t let this be the way people think of your standards work: