James Oppenheim’s blog

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo.

I spend most of my daily working hours as a front-end developer creating custom HTML, CSS, JavaScript for the web. However, from time to time I have to dip my toes into HTML emails. Which is not such a stretch as after all they use the same underlying technologies. Making them even more comparable is the pain I have to go through bending, cheating and hacking the code to fit with a Microsoft product:

Internet Explorer 6 is to web development as Outlook 2007 is to HTML email development - A massive time waster!

As outlined back in January 2007 by the Campaign Monitor guys Microsoft Outlook 2007 uses the Word rendering engine to display emails, that means:

1. No background images
2. Poor background colour support
3. No support for float or position
4. Shocking box model support

The Good

Internet Explorer 8 has a high level of CSS 2.1 support, which is a fantastic move in the right direction.

The Bad

Internet Explorer 6 and its additional development time to support it will be with us for a long time to come and Internet Explorer 8 does not support any CSS3.

The Ugly

Just when you though Microsoft was listening to standards bodies and creating a better Internet environment for all they mention that Outlook 2010 will also still use the Word rendering engine.

Hopefully, the Email Standards Project’s latest website http://fixoutlook.org/ will implore Microsoft to do the right thing and stop using Microsoft Word to render emails. Please, please, please. If I say it three times does it become true? I hope so.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Outlook, Email Standards, fixoutlook.org

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Areeba, LinkedIn, Web Standards, Interesting Sites, Web, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.