Flickr Photo: Mick OFor a long time, there was a great debate in the nptech community that divided us into two distinct camps. The discussions were fierce, the arguments occasionally heated. We were battling for the future of email, and the question was:

Text or HTML?

These days, any e-marketer will tell you that HTML tends to outperform text across the board (though you're still obligated to provide a text version for those who haven't crossed over to the dark side). The problem is, designing HTML emails is a total pain in the, well, I'll go with neck. This is a family blog.

Almost all of us use CSS to some degree in our HTML email design. Cascading Style Sheets are the bits of code that make it possible for the various elements of our email to line up nicely, bold where needed, and otherwise look pretty... without oodles of repetitive HTML code or the use of the dreaded tables. That's how we made HTML emails back in the day. It worked, but it wasn't pretty.

Unfortunately, the explosion of email clients, and more importantly, their myriad ways of handling HTML and CSS code, means that it's nearly impossible to design an HTML email that will render the same in every client. Figuring out what worked where was basically guesswork.

Well, guess no more! The folks at Campaign Monitor have been great over the last couple of years at sharing their lessons learned with the general public. They've released a really helpful chart documenting the CSS support in all the email clients, indicating which CSS elements are completely safe, which are risky, and which should be avoided.

Check out the guide and make sure your CSS is up to snuff. Or, you could just go back to wrangling all those tables again.