The Email and P Myth

By Adrian Sutton

One of the greatest frustrations for anyone who develops an HTML editor is the constant supply of people who are convinced they want to use BR tags instead of P tags. Most of these are just people who don’t want “double spacing” and they’re happy once you give them the magical CSS incantation:

p {
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-bottom: 0;
}

The other group however are people writing HTML emails who insist that P tags are completely incompatible with some email clients and cause rendering problems. At one point it seems that Yahoo! Mail really did strip them entirely but now it just applies a different default CSS styling (ironically, the magical CSS above that removes the extra spacing). So if you naively use P without specifying the padding you want, some clients will display a blank line between paragraphs, others, notably Yahoo!, will push all the lines immediately under each other. The solution is of course the opposite magical CSS incantation:

p {
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
}

Solved right? Nope. This runs straight into the where the heck do I define styles? problem. In HTML, it should be:

<html>
<head>
<style>
p {
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
…
</body>
</html>

However while this works in some clients, it has no effect in most. Instead, the common wisdom is to move the style tag into the body tag:

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<style>
p {
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
}
</style>
…
</body>
</html>

Which works almost everywhere. Enter GMail. GMail never respects the style tag, only inline styles. So now you need to write your paragraphs as:

<p style=”margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1em;”>…</p>

Thankfully you can use the margin shorthand if you know what you want the left and right margins to be as well:

<p style=”margin: 0 0 1em 0;”>…</p>

I would strongly recommend using embedded styles while editing and then just use post processing to inline all the styles – Premailer can do that for you.

As far as I can tell, there is no need to avoid P tags in email anymore and sampling a number of emails from various clients that happened to be in my inbox, they turned out to appear in emails from a few different clients though that’s far from scientific and it was still intermingled with a lot of
and


hacks. I would be very keen to hear from anyone who knows of an email client that cannot be made to render P tags correctly.

With a bit of luck we may be able to start moving away from the horrific abuses of
tags…