Creating HTML emails is hard — much more difficult than creating a web page in HTML.  Bootstrap and Foundation spoil front-end developers.  Slap a couple classes in your code and you can have a beautiful, or at least beautifully rendered, adaptive/responsive site in nearly every browser.  Not so with email.  Many email clients strip external CSS, leaving only inline styles.  Some email clients render only a small subset of CSS.  And of course, JavaScript is out of the question.

A hands-on look at enabling rich previews of links in iMessage, Facebook, and beyond. First published on January 9th, 2017 at markcarlson.io

The iMessage app in iOS 10 provides rich previews of links when they are properly formatted to take advantage of this new feature.  In addition, these same links will contain rich previews in other apps too, like Facebook, Reddit, WhatsApp, Skype, Twitter, and others with the same configuration.

This article was originally published here in July 2016 and is republished here with the author's permission.