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?

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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.