Question

I got some auto generated HMLT code working. Made sure it is correctly parsed by http://validator.w3.org/, and it is a working HTML4.01 Strict.

Now, when I embed this code in a email and send it to gmail, the result is quite adverse (messes up the formatting).

The code is quite long, and apparently only happens when it has such size. This tells me two things:

• not worth putting a code snippet here
• it is probably some conflicting tag, but still considered valid the parser

Would you guys know of any tool even more strict to validate my HTML? Maybe even something specific for gmail?

Or maybe, just some pro tip on what usually screws the code for gmail.

ps.: the code, although is long, is also quite simple, only a few tables and styles – I took some care in making sure used only “email friendly” tags and formats.

Answer 1

All the answers here helped, but the actual problem was elsewhere.

The problem was In the HTML as I thought, but not exactly in my HTML.

Turns out the the email client will wrap lines too big before handling it to render, regardless if it is HTML code or whatever, more exactly, breaking tags in the middle – that explain why it was happening only when the report reached a certain length.

What tipped me that was when I looked at the code generated by MailChimp (suggested by Alexandre Rafalovitch) and noticed it was formatted as quoted-printable, cropped at exactly 75chars for every line.

After that was easy enough to do the same in my own code generator. Well, actually, I didn’t even format as quoted-printable, only made sure it would wrap too long lines by itself.

Apart from that, for all I can tell, a HTML 4.01 Strict code will work pretty much fine in a Gmail client.

Hope it helps post-1999 generations.

cheers.