The WebKit guys have put together a new Javascript benchmark under the name “SunSpider“. It’s intended to go further than simple benchmarks like Celtic Kane’s and try to emulate real-world tasks. Safari/WebKit has been getting pretty quick on these benchmarks anyway, but this new one really shows its strengths. There are various comments about people’s results in the comments for that post, but no compilation for easy comparison, so I’ve put one together.
Updated: added Webkit Win and Opera 9.5b Win
Updated: Failed to run completely on Opera 9.5b Mac
Updated: Some stats for Opera 9.5b Mac and IE6
Updated March 18th: Added Safari 3.1, FF3b4, IE8
The Email Standards Project
The Email Standards Project is a worthy effort to try to get email clients to handle HTML email in a consistent way. Many already do pretty well, but there are some big exceptions: Outlook 2007 (with its ancient Word rendering engine), GMail, .Mac, Hotmail and others. Many are opposed to the whole idea of HTML email, but often their resentment is based on the fact that historically email client support has been so bad that they’ve had very poor experiences. Worse is that some senders (not us!) send HTML-only messages, which is certainly something that will drive a Mutt user potty. Smartmessages supports sending in plain, html and mixed formats (settable by each individual subscriber), and we ensure that our users get a clean, reliable platform for delivering their creations, so we try to work around the deficiencies of things like MS Exchange.
Generally the poor support in big-name clients has led to a need to develop HTML for email for very much the lowest common denominator, which for the most part means no CSS (unless you’re prepared to tiptoe through the minefields of using it), no images, no scripts, no forms, no attachments. Too many designers think of email as being just like the web, but it’s not – the vast majority of web pages will simply not work as email. These days the only effective way of designing for email is to start out with classic HTML 4.0 with no CSS or images and make your message look good using only type, white space and colour, because this is probably all that 90% (yes, really that much) of your recipients are going to see. You can then sprinkle a few images in for enhancement, but you should have no text in images that is not shown as text. With the advent of Outlook 2007’s big step backwards, it’s no longer possible to use background images, so you can’t have text over images at all. You also can’t rely on alt attributes as image fallbacks, as some big clients don’t display the alt text if images are being suppressed as an anti-spam measure.
Many designers get very uppity about this kind of thing as it means that their palette of options is severely constrained, however, it should really be regarded as a challenge. It’s not too hard to make stuff look good with heavy use of images (see CSS Zen Garden for gorgeous examples), but producing stuff that looks good with no images or CSS (or more to the point to still look good when those parts have been ripped out) takes a great deal of skill, experience and appreciation of the medium.
Any effort to try and raise the bar gets our support, so props to the Email Standards Project and to Freshview for starting it.