Yahoo Paragraphs
From EtelligentWiki
A recent change to Yahoo! Mail, affecting both the Classic and New versions of their webmail, sees the spacing between paragraphs of text being removed.
Use this simple fix to force Yahoo to show the correct paragraph spacing:
- Delete your paragraph spacing in Etelligent's Editor by backspacing the lower paragraph text onto the same line as the previous one
- Use a double carriage return to recreate the equivalent spacing (hold down Shift and hit Enter twice)
What about other email clients?
We have tested the rendering consistency of this fix across the following email clients and can confirm that it has no negative effect:
- Yahoo! Mail Classic
- Yahoo! New
- Gmail
- Google Business Apps
- AOL (webmail)
- WindowsMail (Vista)
- Outlook 2002
- Outlook 2007
- Thunderbird 2
- Eudora 9
Happily the double carriage return does appear to accurately recreate the size of regular paragraph spacing.
What is happening?
Firstly, the issue is entirely Yahoo's creation. Their webmail is resetting the margin-top and margin-bottom style attributes for HTML paragraphs.
Why has it suddenly stopped working?
Yahoo! develops a web framework called YUI (the Yahoo! User Interface Library); this framework includes a base stylesheet called Reset CSS, which zeros/resets web browsers' default settings for rendering HTML elements. This is useful because web pages can look quite different depending on what web browser you are using. This reset is a great tool for web designers -- essentially it means that they can be confident that their web pages will look as similar as possible in all browsers. The trick is to set everything in an HTML document to the same base and then semantically reset every element to what you want it to be.
Our guess is that Yahoo! have rolled out a version of this reset CSS to Yahoo! Mail's email rendering. We think this is a mistake, since email design, by its very nature, precludes extensive use of CSS. The reset is only appropriate for designers who use the Yahoo's CSS framework -- which precisely no email designer is likely to do. YUI is not appropriate for email design simply because of the unreliable CSS support across email clients. After all, if it were reliable, we'd all be using a box model instead of HTML tables for layout. It isn't and we aren't.
We're hopeful that this was either a mistake on Yahoo's part or something that they will strongly reconsider. In the mean time, use two BRs (Shift + double Return) for spacing paragraphs instead of relying on the default spacing.
