Introduction — What is DML?

Dyspatch Markup Language (DML) is Dyspatch’s HTML Framework.

Ensures templates are responsive and compatible with all email clients and devices
Handles the quirks of email coding so that you don’t have to worry about sending broken emails
Helps you reclaim engineering resources spent on coding and troubleshooting emails

DML code vs. HTML code

Benefits of DML

Spend less time testing your email templates
- • DML elements are pre-built with the boilerplate code necessary for ensuring your emails will display correctly in every email client, meaning most of your code will just work.

Efficient, human-readable code lets you build quickly and accomplish more with far fewer lines of code
- • DML elements have been named to describe their content, so that many are self-explanatory and easy to understand — your text will live inside of dys-text, you images in dys-img, etc.

Make your templates portable across different ESPs
- • If you want to move to an ESP that uses a different templating language, you don’t need to re-code your templating logic, just export your template and let Dyspatch handle the translation
Build reusable, versatile code with DML blocks
- • Non-technical team members can self-serve with Dyspatch’s drag-and-drop visual editor.
- • Images, links, and content can be edited without touching the code.

Thinking With Blocks

When working with DML, you’re creating individual, reusable blocks, rather than an entire email.

• Break down a template into existing, reusable segments - each of those is a potential block!
• These can be rearranged and edited in our drag-and-drop visual editor
• No need to rebuild the basics for every template
• Ensure branding stays consistent across templates

Email broken down into separarte blocks

DML Playground

As you go through this course, most sections will have links to the DML Playground. Clicking on those links will bring you a page pre-loaded with that example’s code so that you can see the block in action. Feel free to try altering the code in the examples — check out the DML Documentation for more information on specific attributes for each element!