The standards and best practices in creating HTML Email are different compared to creating HTML for a web design. Instead of checking for cross-browser compatibility, it’s necessary to test to check how different email client types render HTML and CSS.

The Email Standards Project [www.email-standards.org] is an organization leading the way to improve the web standards and accessibility in email. They are working with both the designers and email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. Currently, acid test is conducted on several of the email clients to determine the level of support. Based on the acid test, they’ve determined which commonly used CSS are supported.

For example, in Google Gmail, there is partial or no support in following high priority styles:

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As one of the few coders who were first introduced to XHTML prior to HTML, I was fortunate enough to not acquire the bad habits of HTML. However, I did have my share of encounters of bad HTML over the years. Back then, I remember being asked to fix a style issue on a page that was coded in all caps with no CSS style and why the page looked different in Firefox and Explorer. Today, these are the habits of the old. And now, there is XHTML to resolve such issues.

XHTML is the “new” HTML and it stands for Extensible HyperText Markup Language. XTHML is a form of XML which is designed to describe data. XHTML, on the contrary, is stricter and cleaner version of HTML. XTHML is the Word Wide Consortium’s (W3C) Recommendation, considering that all new browsers support it. Basically, this is the proper method of creating web pages.

Here are guidelines to write XTHML:
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