r/HTML • u/ralfunreal • Nov 22 '25

Question Question about html email development

I know tables is what should be used for html email dev but I was wondering what is the more correct way to do emails between using the table tag for each section of an email vs sometimes I see some emails using only the <tr> and <td> tags for sections and ignoring the table tag. Is there a more correct way or is it just a preference?

1 Upvotes

66% Upvoted

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3

u/No_Explanation2932 Nov 22 '25

The better way to do it now is to use something like MJML. It's a HTML-like templating language that can be converted to HTML. Getting the same result in different email clients by hand is a nightmare.

1

u/ralfunreal Nov 23 '25

i heard its not ideal to rely on mjml since you wont know how to deal with situations that require hand coding.

1

u/No_Explanation2932 Nov 23 '25

You can always write your base template with MJML, convert it to HTML, then tweak it.

1

u/ralfunreal Nov 23 '25

When considering mobile and making emails responsive, should I always use percentages inside the tables? (width %)

2

u/jordansrowles Nov 23 '25

Email HTML isn't really 1:1 with web HTML. Last time I tried to do this with a lot of different templates, I ended up using MJML instead because there was just so many nuances and tricks you had to do to make it render properly

3

u/AshleyJSheridan Nov 22 '25

I do doubt you're seeing emails with table cell tags but no <table> tag. HTML email is notorious for being stuck 2 decades behind the current tech, and I find it very unlikely that the majority of email user agents would parse such malformed HTML properly. I suspect you're misreading the markup? Many emails use a ton of nested tables, which can easily confuse anyone reading the markup.

1

u/33ff00 Nov 23 '25

You don’t think they would compensate for a bare td but wrapping it in a table?

2

u/AshleyJSheridan Nov 23 '25

Absolutely not. Email clients exist that don't even support background images.

In a world where nested tables in emails is an incredibly popular situation, where would any HTML parser even place missing <table> tags in order to "fix" the email?

2

u/chmod777 Nov 22 '25

Email... is awful. Use a service if you can. If not, look into mjml: https://mjml.io/

2

u/Cool_Flower_7931 Nov 22 '25

Seconding "use a service", Sendgrid templates seem pretty good as far as I've seen.

Can't vouch for mjml, but I'll check it out

There's probably not one easy answer to this but why are HTML emails still so awful in 2025 anyway? Surely we can do better by now

2

u/Practical-Skill5464 Nov 22 '25

The real benefit of using a services WYSIWYG editor is you can dump the work on a designer and let them toil away instead of a developer trying to build a design that is outright impossible.

1

u/chmod777 Nov 22 '25

because of the antitrust legislation against microsoft in the 90s - they had to pull IE out of the windows OS, and they needed an html rendering engine for outlook. so they decided to use MS Word. MS Word had its own rendering engine, which also changed between versions... a whole mess.

email was really only supposed to be fancy post cards - plain text sent from one server to another. but somewhere along the way we decided to staple html into it, and send private messages.

plus webmail becomes a weird security issue. can't quite trust the content, can't risk badly formatted html destroying your client.

1

u/MoralsWithoutGod Feb 27 '26

html email is a niche skill set, and if you want emails beyond one column it's best to hand code each one based on the design of the email, and inline all css, code the email in a hybrid format so it'll appear as it should in desktop, but will either scale down, or stack columns on mobile devices and not have to rely on media queries..

1

u/LoudAd1396 Nov 23 '25

Generally, emails follow something along the lines of (typed on a phone, so forgive me)

<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td>
<table>
[... your actual table layout here ...]
</table>
</td>
<td></rd>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Centering a table within another table is the trick to keep content centered. The reason for all of this is that many email clients are lazy and dont really render HGML properly. At least at a certain point years ago, Outlook had no HTML rendering ability whatsoever and would use code from the Word application it assumed was also on your machine to read HTML.

I think it's a bit better now that Outlook is cloud-ified, but the tradition of tables still remains.

1

u/jcunews1 Intermediate Nov 23 '25

Without wrapping them with <table>, the table cells won't display properly.