You want it coded in what?

I have to ask, who the heck still uses HTML 3.2? For those of you who left it all behind years ago (with good reason), here’s a short list of things you can’t use in 3.2:

• Stylesheets – none. zero. Ditto for inline styles – HTML 3.2 hates ’em.
• font face – Technically, there is no way to dictate what font you want to use – it’s just that browsers of that time period started accepting them, even if they were out of standard. You can, however, use that damned font tag until your hearts content.
• font-size – only in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 … or in +1/-1, +2/-2, etc.
• background – none of the variables work, but you can use the old bgcolor, but only in certain elements (body, div). Not much help if you have to design using tables (because what would HTML 3.2 be without tables, right?).
• target – although, since this was an email, that’s not that big a deal. Plus, it’s deprecated for HTML 4.01 STRICT anyway.
• BR and HR – I don’t know how many times I had to go back and switch my < br /> tags.
• cellmargin, cellpadding, cellspacing, height (of a table or div) and margin – Oh, and IDs? They’re not around yet (hence, no stylesheets).

Creating this email would have been great and even easy had it not been for the HTML 3.2 portion of it. As it was, I was faced with creating yet another drab experience based on the old, boring template or trying to jerry-rig my design into HTML 3.2. In the end, what worked was a wholly image-based email or a sure-to-break-if-they-increase-the-font-size-too-much design.

God, I hope they upgrade to a new system soon.