Microsoft has confirmed that its premier email client, Outlook, will remain non-compliant with web standards in the next version of MS Office due out in 2010.
The statement comes in response to a campaign launched by the Email Standards Project 
, asking Microsoft to provide Outlook with text rendering that complies with web standards (like almost every other major email client on the market — see a list of them ), and to reverse the decision made in Office 2007 to use Word’s text engine rather than an HTML-compliant editor to compose emails.
MS Word does not provide support for key elements of CSS design tags like float, margin, padding, background-image and many more. You can quickly get a sense of the problem by looking at this image of an email displayed by Outlook 2000 and 2007:
In a post on the Outlook Team Blog , the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Office Communications and Forms Team William Kennedy says that,
…while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents.
Of course, a lack of web standards is not the only problem Outlook causes for Mail.app users, perhaps not even the main one.
The Campaign to fix Outlook is not giving up. You can read more about it on its web site or, if you twitter, make your compliant known that way.
[...] Mail Signature comes through as attachment Outlook to remain HTML non-compliant in 2010 __________________ iMac CD & MacBook C2D RAM upgrade iMac – MacBook OS X system management [...]
[...] Microsoft Outlook to remain HTML non-compliant [...]
“with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years”
I don’t think anyone who’s ever had to use Word would qualify the experience as enjoyable. It’s nice that people are campaigning, nice but futile.
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[...] No big surprise; Microsoft Outlook will continue to shun HTML standards in the 2010 version: http://bit.ly/yMAWX [...]
This should be a rebuttal to all those who say Microsoft is open standards supportive, more so than Apple.
“This should be a rebuttal to all those who say Microsoft is open standards supportive”
What deluded maniac would ever even try to claim that?
For example, IE’s abysmal failure here:
http://acid3.acidtests.org/
is well known.
And did people miss this?
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/follow-up-on-excel-2007-sp2s-odf.html
Never has been “open standards supportive”, never will be.
There’s been a drive to add *some* more standards support into IE — mainly, one feels, so as not to annoy the web development community, which resents the extra work getting around its quirks causes, and which has been saying so vocally. That’s bad publicity.
But don’t expect to see serious HMTL5 and SVG support any time soon. That would conflict with MS’s desire to take over ownership of the web with Silverlight.
Never has been “open standards supportive”, never will be.
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[...] Hawk Wings: Microsoft Outlook to Remain HTML Non-Compliant [...]
[...] Microsoft Outlook to remain HTML non-compliant | Hawk Wings [...]
My favorite thing was to embed ani gifs in mail to the delight of many of my recipients …well, no more!! …to do it now, I open m$ie and open the gmail portal and send it there …google had the good sense to add that feature back a while ago …bought office 2007 premiere (happily for only $59, not $600) and did so in hopes, especially for outlook, of benefiting from the expanded limit in size of the .pst folder …well, I miss my old outlook 2002 and shudda gotten a ratty old copy of outlook 2003 offa ebay and left the rest alone …interface stinks and is bothersome and wastes real estate to boot …it’s a resource hog too …billgates is itchin’ for a lynchin’ imho!!
…and furthermore, why the heck do they make you set the view characteristics of every stinkin’ folder individually insteada allowing settings to cover all folders as an option …irks me blind these kinds of stupidities that restrict the user to the m$ mold (as in moldy)…
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I kinda like the idea of broken HTML support in Outlook, maybe soon no one will use HTML in emails anymore.
That would be a big step forward!