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."
Questions on that. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:email designers? (Score:5, Interesting)
On a completely unrelated note, all Microsoft's e-mail newsletters use table-based layouts.
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.
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 are opening a document. What a terrible, terrible idea.
Re:Fortunately, Word is also bad at rendering Word (Score:3, Interesting)
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 document to print and spent a hurried five minutes fixing their paragraphs not to changes pages in the middle, because they did it in the library. And in the other labs, about half the time you'd run into the same problem, because they did it in the other lab.
Some of the students figured out you could switch your printer to another room's printer and print them correctly...assuming you could find an empty room to print in, as teachers started getting upset at people coming into their class to collect printouts. There usually was one, the school tried to keep at least one lab open, but it was a crapshot if they had the right kind of printer.
Then people started forgetting to change printers back, so people who'd figured out what was going on would prepare a document in a single room, and print it there, only to discover their printer was set elsewhere, and then switch it back, only to discover their formatting was off. It didn't help that this process would sometimes be interrupted by a random angry teacher, who, pissed that people were printing in their classroom, had snatched their misprint off the printer and tracked down the person who'd printed it. (The name and class were usually on there.)
It was total and complete chaos the entire time I went there, because of dumbass Microsoft and their brilliant formatting-changes-with-the-printer idea. The official policy was 'Check the printer every day before you start, and only work on formatting in the lab you're going to print in', but college students and rules do not go together.
Me? I used Open Office on my laptop, 'printed' off a PDF, stuck it online, and printed from within IE, after making sure the printer was right. (IIRC, people usually changed it within Word, so everything else still printed to the right printer.) If I needed to mail a Word document, instead of turn one in, I'd export to Word format, stick it up online, view it within IE to make sure it was okay, and mail it from my laptop.
I did, at one point, manage to get my laptop logging onto their network so I could use the printers, but it was a huge hassle and I soon gave up on that.
Re:Guilty. (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!) unfortunately the layout doesn't change so there are now fewer and fewer words in that ribbon because it's still just as wide, but the font is now ten times bigger. If designers couldn't specify sizes these pages would just render properly.
If I didn't use Aardvark to fix these broken websites I'd be unable to use half the web. (I need to check out Opera, I hear its zooming works much better than Firefox.)
BTW, anyone who says that MS-Windows is ready for the prime time, try using Large Fonts and look at how many programs that screws the UI in and how many of those are Microsoft products. 21 years to copy the Mac...