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New Outlook Won't Use IE To Render HTML
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Jan 13, 2007 04:29 PM
from the 7-years-back dept.
from the 7-years-back dept.
loconet writes to tell us about a little surprise coming in Outlook 2007: it will render HTML email using the MS Word engine, dropping the use of IE for this purpose. This represents a body-check to the movement towards Web standards. Whatever you think about HTML email, lots of it gets generated, and those generating it won't be able to use CSS any more, and may stop pushing for more widespread standards support. The announcement was made on MSDN. From the Campaign Monitor post: "Imagine for a second that the new version of IE7 killed off the majority of CSS support and only allowed table based layouts. The web design world would be up in arms! Well, that's exactly what the new version of Outlook does to email designers."
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email designers? (Score:4, Insightful)
But why should the job title "e-mail designer" even exist? Why does e-mail even need design? The point is to get in, communicate, and get out. Making the presentation of this communication unusually attractive is for PDFs and for advertisements.
Re:email designers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Questions on that. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Questions on that. (Score:5, Informative)
I work for communication agencies. Here is how it works usually:
They tell me that they need to send an e-mailing for X (products, event, whatever). here is the content and the lay-out (a mockup). It should be sent before XX/XX/20XX at X O'clock (if it is a local business, at 9 in the morning because people are reading their emails).
So we make the lay-out, we place the content. We test it ith a series of webmails, Thunderbird, Lotus Notes (yes we still do...), Apple Mail, Outlook and so on. We send a test email to the communication agency.
They tell me to increasse the font size, align paragraph X with the picture...That's all.
But attached images or links is purely technical business. If it is linked it will appear as broken link for the communication agency (images are usually blocked by software because fake pictures can help spammers to know that an email account is active or not): They don't understand it.
Some of them who understands a bit of technique force us to send a pure HTML email (no multipart plain text) because some software are configured to render the plain text first.
All they want me to do is an email that works and an email that respects laws (link to unsubscription, etc.) and of course some stats such as the number of clicks on a link inside the HTML email (can be easily calcultated with a redirect script).
I have rarely use CSS anyway. Such a technique is already incompatible with a variety of applications (broken links to the CSS file or styles overriden by webmails for example).
For those who say that plain text email works better than HTML email: it depends of your target. I will certainly advice plain text for a geek mailing list but for lambda users they prefer shiny lay-out (stats prooves it).
For those who said that they can't read the email with Pine or with their telnet account. Nobody care about martians.
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It's about storage space. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have over 10,000 messages in my mail box. Now you can see the problem? And I'm just one person. On a network, this can quickly become a major issue.
Think of the problem with 1,000 employees, with 5,000-10,000 messages each at a company.
Not to mention that spammers love this because they can get this past the spam filters very easily.
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Re:It's about storage space. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want me to see a web page, please send me a URL in the email. Give me the choice.
Please.
I'm thinking that there might be enough crap getting sent through email that if people just did the right thing and left the fancy visuals to web pages, we might not have some of the bandwidth issues we're having. Now obviously, video and audio and torrents are the main hogs, but the junk mail can't be helping matters. And I seriously cannot recall a single of these web-page emails that was anything but junk to me.
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Re:It's about storage space. (Score:4, Insightful)
worse still they tend to do it from behind the cloak of those they work for so noone can make thier lives hell in return.
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There are good fancy first impressions and bad ones. If I open an envelope and expect I letter, I'll junk a beautiful flyer because it's obviously bulk email and can say nothing that I need to hear - if their product is important Anandtech will review it, or whatever. It'll enter my view through one of the experts who find good products, not a shill who pumps anything.
If however, I open that envelope and find a letter written by a person about a concern of mine and it poi
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And you can't see how that's perhaps, just a little bit melodramatic?!! Oh the adverts on the TV that burn through the air and impact my retinas, eating like hungry dogs to my enternally increasingly darkening brain, the dollar bondage capitalism that scratches control from the wrists of those who are... well, basically, not responsible for their own actions, by your own assertion. If y
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And, yes, some of us still use dial-up. Not everyone lives in a densly-populated area, even in the Western world.
Re:Guilty. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it is time for us old farts to give up this fight, and admit we lost--and that we lost because we were actually on the wrong side.
Consider regular mail. The kind you put on paper and send in an envelope via the post office. If I were sending someone a regular mail asking them, say, about a strange spike in bandwidth usage last Tuesday, I would, naturally, include a graph showing bandwidth usage for the week. And if I also mentioned that the new server rack was in place, I might include a photo, either separately in the envelope, or inline in the letter.
Now let's imagine email had never been invented, and we just came up with the idea. How would we design an email system? I think we'd think it obvious that we have to make it at least as capable as regular mail, and would probably come up with an HTML body plus attachments as the format (for portability, as opposed to word processor formats). I think there is zero chance we'd say "wait a minute...we'd better make this plain text only, because 25 years ago, many computers did not have graphical displays".
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When plain-text email arrives it's *always* in the size and font that I have chosen for maximum readability, with HTML email it's almost always forced to a very inconvenient size.
I never had a problem reading stuff online before, until I got a 24" LCD. Now everything by default is this tiny ribbon down the middle third of the screen. When I use Firefox to resize the fonts (try that in IE! Hah!) unfortunate
Re:email designers? (Score:5, Interesting)
On a completely unrelated note, all Microsoft's e-mail newsletters use table-based layouts.
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Re:email designers? (Score:5, Interesting)
What the hell is it with the hair shirt brigade?
Do you whine and whinge about graphics and layout on webpages? No, you whine and whinge about people NOT using CSS. You even get up in arms about badly constructed CSS webpages not rendering correctly (Acid2).
Well guess what. For certain purposes how an email looks is very important - at least as important as what it says. Using the same standard for that is used for webpages makes a vast amount of sense. Thus this move by Microsoft is another f*ck y*u to those that want some sanity and consistancy in approach.
You want to send text only email, then send text only emails. But don't start whine about those that need and use more.
Parent
Re:email designers? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it doesn't, for several reasons.
For a start, e-mail is a push medium, while the web is a pull medium. I am unlikely to accidentally receive a huge web page containing nothing but junk advertising by mistake; the closest you get is an e-commerce or review site that contains lots of banner ads. I am unlikely to accidentally receive a web page full of porn, or other material that may not be legal in my jurisdiction. If a web page is bloated and takes ages to load over a 56K modem (don't make the mistake of thinking everyone has high-speed Internet access; we are far from there yet) then I can stop it and go somewhere else, while most people don't know how to configure their e-mail client to ignore big spam mails and get to the important stuff.
Next up, about 99.999% of the web using public use a fully graphical browser (source: my backside). In contrast, a very significant proportion of e-mail users have text-only mail clients. This includes many in the academic community, increasing numbers of people who read e-mail on devices other than a desktop or laptop computer with a big screen, etc.
There are several other issues as well, but I think either of those alone is enough to refute your point. As a third and final point for now, not everyone uses Outlook to read mail, not by a long shot. If Microsoft play chicken here, I think they'll lose this one, just as Firefox tends to lose the standards argument with any non-geek who finds his bank/cinema/local shop web site doesn't render properly. "But it works with $POPULAR_ALTERNATIVE!" they will cry, as they wonder what this rubbish software on their computer is doing there and why stuff used to work and is now broken.
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Re:email designers? (Score:4, Insightful)
* A simple, open standard
* Conveniently human-readable
* Platform Agnostic - unknown tags and attributes can be ignored
* Data Includes clear type information
The HTML / XHTML / CSS rendering engines are powerful things. They provide a worthy layout system, which is what some email calls-for, and in the case of XHTML/CSS it provides a means to distribute information in a human- and machine-readable way that includes rich contextual information. Most importantly, it's a simple open standard that any application can adopt, and it avoids duplication of effort for the purpose of device-agnostic layout.
Microsoft is making a blunder by doing this. It's an echo of their days of trying to knock down Netscape by leveraging their platform. They are now trying to do the same thing to open standards. As a monopoly, you might argue that Microsoft is using their monopoly position to lock out a viable competitor. Standards represent something analogous to software, and having a monopoly on standards is not different than having a monopoly on software.
If the case were clearer, maybe the EFF would take it up.
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We send out a nicely formatted text version as well. Even the pure text version is still subject to design decisions on how to position stories and headlines versus summaries. HTML is a tool, but even without it, designing nicely formatted emails for a large group of peo
Re:email designers? (Score:5, Funny)
Because it sounds better than "spammer".
Parent
No Shit? Never Did... (Score:4, Insightful)
And if it DID change from this to IE, the geeks would be complaining the same -- because IE is a lot more tied to the system than Word.
Beyond this, the items that don't get rendered are good things -- for *EMAIL*.
I don't want someone being able to play with images too much. I don't want messages sent to me fucking with the positions. I don't want Javascript running in my email. I don't want forms that could potentially read the rest of my inbox available (if the JS were activated that geeks are getting up in arms about).
Almost everything that Word doesn't do are features I don't want my email reader to do.
Then again, I read my mail in plain text. I don't use Windows, I'm on a Mac right now using Foxfire (I don't like safari). My business lives off of BSD and Linux for our servers. And fucking shit...I'm having to defend Microsoft on this.
Re:No Shit? Never Did... (Score:5, Informative)
However, Outlook 2003 used IE for rendering. It ran in a very strict security zone -- no external ANYTHING (except, and only images, and only if you enabled them, with defaults to "off").
If you send RTF e-mail (worse than HTML), it used the Word rendering engine. That's why I don't understand this change at all. If you format a message in Word, doesn't it send it as RTF, and thus render under word on the recipient's computer?
Personally, I fear the Word engine more than IE7, by far! The Word format allows you to embed all sorts of nasties, including macros, 3rd party objects, other documents, etc.
Like it or not, e-mail is used for more than quick notes to each other. It's used for invoices, advertisement (tasteful or not, opt in or not), pictures, etc, things that a secure, well-rounded rendering engine (like IE7 under strict settings in a sandbox) could help with.
Step in the completely wrong direction, again, Microsoft. And to think I was going to sign up for their release party to get a free copy of Office. Hah!
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"Microsoft Office applications, including Outlook, use Internet Explorer to render HTML in various parts of the applications. Microsoft Outlook does not contain any core code designed to render HTML. Instead, when HTML needs to be rendered, Outlook can use Internet Explorer in one of two ways:..." [microsoft.com]
>if the JS were activated that geeks are getting up in arms about
Nobody sane advocates JS in email. The complaint is about not having CSS.
HTML email (Score:2, Insightful)
Good Thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Keith
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Bad Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we'll see exploits for IE and exploits for Outlook's renderer.
They've made the rendering part of the OS. If you cannot replace it with a different one, at least all of their apps should rely upon the same, built-in, OS functionality.
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Re:Good Thing (Score:4, Funny)
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Good news? (Score:2)
Gmail (Score:4, Informative)
So, really, nothing new here. It's not like other clients aren't just as bad.
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Nice.
The saying "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" comes to mind. I'm buying a horse, and the most expensive horse on the average users markets and I'm looking at the teeth very thoroughly.
Evilplot to kill HTML or plan to improve security? (Score:2)
Several things people are forgetting (Score:2)
That aside, if they're trying to fix security problems, they're pretty much throwing the baby out with the bathwater -- there are decided advantages to being able to use CSS and proper markup, even in email (think smaller messages, and messages t
An end of an era? (Score:2)
See if I care (Score:2)
Seriously, if its HTML its sure to be spam anyway. We don't need it. We don't want it. Send it strait to hell.
Fortunately, Word is also bad at rendering Word! (Score:5, Informative)
But, fortunately, each version of Word seems to do an equally bad job of rendering previous versions of its own "standard."
I was in a meeting once that got a little heated. Notes had been circulated in advance by the presenter, as Word attachments to email. After some puzzling exchanges, it became clear that one recipient was on the verge of anger because the presenter had apparently failed to include the key information, the discussion of which was the purpose of the meeting.
Finally the presenter said, "But, but, but, it's all in the table on page 2."
The recipient said, "Yeah, right--but all the important entries are... BLANK!" There were murmurs of "hear, hear" from others. Then someone piped up and said "What do you mean blank? They're not blank in my copy."
About half the attendees had good copies; half had copies where the important table entries appeared blank.
The odd part is that the presenter and the recipients with blank tables were all using identical version numbers of Word and of Windows. Some other recipients, also using the same versions of Word and Windows, had accurate copies.
It turned out that a) if the contents of a table cell were too large to fit in the cell, instead of displaying a clipped or truncated version of the text--as anyone would expect--Word simply rendered the cell contents as perfect and absolute blank. Had you known this was happening, you could have edited the table to widen the column, causing the text magically to appear... but who would have guessed this was happening? b) In order to render the table properly, the recipient needed not only to have the same version of Word and of Windows, as the sender, and not only all of the fonts used by the sender, but needed to have his screen set to the same resolution!
I am not really sure how large organizations manage to tolerate Word. I suppose they must be willing to upgrade the entire desktop configuration--Windows, Word, fonts, screen size and all--of everyone in the company all at the exact same time.
P. S. Annoyingly enough, the presenter at one point suggested that all the problems were probably being experienced by Mac users. Fortuitously, as it happened none of the Mac users in fact had experienced problems. This was not a result of intrinsic Mac superiority, just an illustration that Microsoft incompetence strikes utterly at random and is not always directed by Machivellian Redmond strategy.
P. P. S. Yes, this was some years ago. No, I have no idea whether Microsoft has fixed this in current versions. I'm personally running Office 98 under Classic and won't upgrade until I'm forced to. I've spend way too much money on Microsoft "upgrades" that add some spiffy new features, a lot of bling, gratuitously change the shortcuts and screen locations of every functions, while failing to fix any of the actual bugs that drive me nuts. If anyone has a tutorial on how to edit numbered lists and bullet lists in a long document without changes in one list causing dozens of incomprehensible changes to other totally unrelated lists throughout the document, please let me know...
Re:Fortunately, Word is also bad at rendering Word (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows font metrics (and thus, rendering in Word) depend on the actual printer resolution. Yes, your truetype fonts will change size with different printers. The effect is subtle, but it causes changes in pagination and can cause things to overflow slightly in tables. Mac OS doesn't do this (and afaik, never has).
This is why Word may give you "Unable to retrieve printer information" if you a
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The greatest gotcha ever.
Once upon a time, I was in college. We had rooms of identical computers in the labs, and two different types of printers. We also had the library, with computers and one of those printer types.
What did this translate to? If you did the work the library, and printed it in some of the labs, your formatting would be off. In others you'd have no problem.
In those computer labs, during classes that had and things to print and turn in, there'd always be someone who walked in with the do
Re:Fortunately, Word is also bad at rendering Word (Score:5, Funny)
The kicker comes when you modify one of the instances. Word takes that to mean that you're modifying not just that instance, but the definition of the Style. So every other instance changes too.
The solution is to explicitly create a Style for each layout you want to use, and invoke it explicitly. Microsoft REALLY wants you to use Styles. After all, it's more efficient to format with Styles. And that makes it a best practice. And everyone knows Microsoft is all about best practices.
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HTML email... blech (Score:2)
The summory is wrong(again!) (Score:5, Informative)
Here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201
The things missing are tags such as form and object, and some javascript support, but nobody is going to blame microsoft for not supporting onClick in emails. And yes tables are supported.
Could this headline/summary BE more wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
The headline and summary are 99% wrong.
Outlook 2007 supports HTML and CSS quite well. Many of you should know this, as you've had the chance to beta test it for about a year now. I have, and all of the HTML newsletters I subscribe to look just fine in Outlook.
In fact, Microsoft has even gone a step further and provided a free CSS/HTML validator [microsoft.com] that developers can use to make sure their messages will be rendered correctly.
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Of course if your office is like mine you already get plenty of those.
"text only" (Score:2)
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Letter To All Email Designers (Score:3, Insightful)
Dear Sir,
Go Fück Yourself. Your profession is responsible for designing all the corporate spam I receive, therefore you deserve this red-hot poker up your årse
Best wishes
C