New Outlook Won't Use IE To Render HTML 319
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."
Gmail (Score:4, Informative)
So, really, nothing new here. It's not like other clients aren't just as bad.
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!
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...
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.
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.
Re:It's about storage space. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bad Thing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No Shit? Never Did... (Score:3, Informative)
"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.
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.