In my email views, I usually just do something like...
<dl>
<dt>Name</dt>
<dd>Value</dd>
</dl>
Should I be doing it like this?
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<dl>
<dt>Name</dt>
<dd>Value</dd>
</dl>
</body>
</html>
In other words, like I was marking up a standalone document?
I guess I can safely assume any web based email client will strip it out?
What is the right way?
Thanks
Depends entirely on the email client that receives it. In my experience, most email clients that will interpret HTML don't care if you have full body/head/html tags, etc. In fact you don't even need those tags for most browsers. You need to have the head tags to include style/title, etc. Otherwise they are not really necessary, per se. I've never seen them to be necessary.
I don't think there is a right way but trying to make the email viewable in as many email readers as posible.
I usually check the emails in Thunderbird, because Outlook forgives more.
In Thunderbird this is the HTML code for an email (i have an extension that shows the html)
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
This is the body text<br>
<div class="moz-signature"><i><br>
<br>
Regards<br>
Alex<br>
</i></div>
</body>
</html>
BTW, i use plain text email for all my web forms every time I can. I had many issues with blackberry email using html+plain text emails.
Whether or not you include the html/head/body tags is entirely irrelevant — they are always optional and will not affect the rendering of the document in any way.
What matters most is whether quirks mode is on or not. Unfortunately, you can’t control that in a webmail setting. Tables and inline styles are your friends. Your best bet is to test in as many webmail and desktop clients as you can.