http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Decent_HTML_in_Outlook_2007/

It’s a long shot, I know…

I’m always to keen to hear about Outlook weirdness, so do let me know if you discover anything.

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.

(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

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.

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.