One of the things I got with Christmas gift cards was a Tsukemono jar. I’ve been fermenting veggies and fruit for more than a year as I found I can eat fermented veggies without the dreaded pukathon. It was time to look into something long term, and so, with my dehydrator, I now have a Tsukemono jar.
These jars use a water airlock system that’s glass (plastic just doesn’t last) much like the little airlocks used for alcohol. In fact, I bet I can make mead in this jar. Yeah, I’m gonna try that after my first batch of pickles finishes next month.
Aia already wants a batch of lemon pickles but we have to wait for those to come in season.
I was filling up the jar (cucumber, dill, salt, cucumber, dill, seaweed, bay, coriander, mustard, garlic, salt, rice wine vinegar, cucumber…) and thinking about my new job. Email development is its own fermenting beast. Straight out of 1999 with kludges and add-ons that would make IE 5.5 blush.
In some ways, it’s like coming home. Debate on the current state of web pales in comparison to the days of the browser wars. Today it’s mostly blog posts or e-zine articles by well respected members of the web developer community saying, “Hey why don’t we…†and everyone nodding their head or forking their own method. Not really any debate. But email? Email is the standardless wild table-filled mess of the 90’s internet. You want margins? Ah, no. Padding? Maybe. Background images? HA! Let me laugh out loud while I hide and sob in the corner.
All those emails you sign up for when you buy something or join something online. Those are sweat. Thousands of lines of code are put into making those pretty emails. Thousands of lines. If you were just making a webpage the same thing would only be a couple hundred. I have one email table that took 187 lines of code. The same thing on the web would take 13 lines of CSS and five lines of HTML5.
I’m not surprised that this beast has been lurking for years while the web has been turning. After all, the state of Email is corporate driven. There is not a consumer base screaming for more email, faster, better development like there was and is for the web at large. I can find a problem in an email and Google the answer. Sure. But unlike web development, an answer from 2001 will probably be just as good as an answer from 2015. And you thought HTML standardization was slow.
The hardest part of Email development is trying to remember things I thought dead and buried with Netscape. How many nested tables do I need to have a horizontal bar under two columns of text? Spacer gifs, padded pixels, and image slicing FTW. SPACER GIFS!!
Right now the problems of email are the same that they used to be for browsers. There is no one standard. Chrome may be a bastion of standardization but Gmail is the red-headed step child of email apps. Safari may always need work but Apple Mail is the gold standard of email. Outlook can’t decide what it’s doing but it can, at least, deal with media queries, which Android native can’t. Desktop clients are on the downward spiral and I suspect that one day we’ll have standard Email…then we can start pushing email like we started pushing the web. Until then, Email sits in its little jar fermenting away.
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