It’s not nice for Mac users to laugh at those who are less fortunate, but when the situation involves a intoxicating mix of Microsoft, email marketers and HTML email, the temptation becomes irresistible.
Outlook 2007 is making a change in the way that it renders HTML email. In the past it used the rendering engine in Internet Explorer, but now it is switching to the less fully-featured rendering engine in Word 2007.
According to Campaign Monitor, this is a disastrous step 
which “takes email design back 5 years”.
In particular, Outlook 2007 users will find the following things missing from their HTML emails:
- No background images – Background images in divs and table cells are gone….
- Poor background color support – Give a div or table cell a background color, add some text to it and the background color displays fine. Nest another table or div inside though and the background color vanishes.
- No support for
floatorposition– Completely breaking any CSS based layouts right from the word go. Tables only.- Shocking box model support – Very poor support for padding and margin, and you thought IE5 was bad!
Campaign Monitor carries an image of how the same email laid out with CSS looks in Outlook 2000 and 2007:
Email marketers are steaming with rage . They will have to redesign all their HTML marketing templates as Office 2007 starts to spread through the corporate and home user markets.
In an interesting twist, some takes this as a tacit admission by Microsoft that the HTML engine in Internet Explorer 7 is still a security liability.
The most important thing Mail.app users can do about this is to keep themselves clean by resisting the Schadenfreude tsunami.
Fine by me. They should revert it all back to plain text. Wanna send a pretty document? Make it a PDF.
Working in the email marketing industry (not spam btw), my clients are already beginning to noticed these large differences between 2003 and 2007.
Its already in our best practices design guide to not use CSS at all, but may of our clients still rely on delivering their newsletters and such this way.
It’s a huge step backward.
I’m not sure what the implications of this are.
The story was Slashdotted awhile back, but few of the comments were to the point, many of them simply being statements that HTML email is undesirable. There are mildly interesting debates around that matter, but it is a different discussion.
I’m not sure what changing the rendering engine is about. It may be about security or it may not be. One Slashdotter claimed that the rending engine is not Word’s but Office’s – I don’t know whether that is accurate – and it might make a kind of sense for Outlook to use Office’s rendering engine as it is part of Office. (Outlook, as you probably know, was already able to use Word as the editor for HTML email.)
Elaborate CSS layouts that will display well in IE’s rendering engine are only of interest to people writing them for internal consumption in a closed environment where all users have Outlook. But put consideration of CSS Iayouts on one side. I think the only wider interest in this one is these questions:
1.) “Just how awful will HTML emails have to be to render well in Outlook now?”
2.) “Does this mean that users (not “email designers” but ordinary users using the WYSIWYG controls inside Outlook) will continue to send badly broken HTML emails from an HTML composer that will now never be fixed?”
There are (or were) debates around whether it would have been better to stick with the format text/enriched for email where some kind of formatting would be helpful:
http://www.avernus.com/~gadams/essays/20020418-html-mail.html
But that format is now more-or-less dead. Apple’s mail for one no longer uses it:
Quote:
Mail 1.x (shipped with Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.3.x) gives you the choice of plain text or “rich text,†by which it means text/enriched. Mail 2.x (shipped with Mac OS X 10.4 and higher) still uses the term “rich text,†but now uses text/html like the rest of the world.
http://alt.cc/jk/49
End quote.
The point is that HTML mail is here to stay, like it or not. However, if it is going to be used it would be better if people were sending well-formed valid HTML. That helps interoperability. I haven’t seen the source-code for HTML produced by Outlook in Office 2007, but if it is anything like the HTML produced by earlier versions of Outlook or Word it will be a darn mess. That is bad for interoperability.
I wonder if this is related to problems I had with ‘font mis-translation’ in emails sent to/from an Outlook 2007-using friend ??
(BTW, the mis-translation problems were slightly different depending on whether I used my default mailer (Apple Mail), or The Behemoth (’Entourage’). ( I have not yet toyed with the WildeBeeste’s Butt (Thunderbird) in MacWorld yet :-)
Steve
I’m glad you picked up on this. It’s making quite a bit of news. I learned of this inanity via SitePoint’s Tech Times newsletter and then via Campaign Monitor’s blog, you noted.
http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/viewissue.php?id=3&issue=156
It means that all of the calls over the past few years for bringing Web standards into mail have been truly set back. It’s not clear if MS can undo what they’ve wrought at this point but it’s bad news for folks committed to making standards a part of everyday technology.
Steve. I don’t know but it would be interesting to find out. I tried and tried to get Outlook 2007 to truncate an email so that I could post about its continuing bad behaviour in that regard, but failed. Attachments, images, rich text, all came through unscathed.
I’m always to keen to hear about Outlook weirdness, so do let me know if you discover anything.
Tom: absolutely right! Revert back to plain text
Maybe this will help:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Decent_HTML_in_Outlook_2007/
It’s a long shot, I know…