HTML emails in Outlook 2007
New version of MS Outlook uses Word to render HTML!
Creating HTML emails that work across the board has always been a black art. Producing HTML pages that work consistently across multiple browsers is challenging enough but when it comes to generating markup that works with most email clients, you’re in a whole new league.
Microsoft have just made this task 10 times harder with the release of their new office suite, Microsoft Office 2007. I ran the beta of this suite for a few weeks and then removed it because I think its incredibly confusing and difficult to use - this however is besides the point. Whilst using the beta, I noticed poor rendering of HTML emails in Outlook and just assumed it would be fixed for the final release. The final release is now out for business users and will soon be unleashed on consumers - all the awful glitches that were present in the beta version of Outlook are still there.
The reason for this is that Microsoft decided to use Word instead of Internet Explorer to render the HTML. Anyone who has ever tried to do anything HTML related in any version of Word will know that this is a recipe for disaster. Word and HTML (and by this I mean proper HTML) have never got on and probably never will. In real terms what this means for developers is that we have another “Lotus notes” to deal with. Anything beyond the most basic “table and spacer gif soup” will screw up in Outlook - a platform which is likely to make up a large proportion of our audience. Ultimately it will be the developers that take the wrap for producing “bad code” that “doesn’t work properly”. Its not likely that business owners/clients/customers will appreciate or care that Microsoft is at fault.
Why on earth Microsoft decided to do this when they have just produced a half decent browser that could do the job far better is beyond me. I can only assume that concurrent development timelines prevented the office team from using IE in Outlook. Surely nobody at Redmond would have chosen the Word route openly and knowingly?
Web standards in HTML emails have been set back a long way because of this and any good work the Internet Explorer team did in producing a more standards friendly browser have now been overshadowed by this latest move. If you’re responsible for producing HTML emails, I suggest you get a copy of Outlook 2007 and test your templates as soon as you can - they are likely to be broken.
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