[dba-Tech] (Fwd) Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007

Stuart McLachlan stuart at lexacorp.com.pg
Wed Jan 10 19:52:31 CST 2007


Forwarded from another list I subscribe to:

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SitePoint Blogs » Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 
2007

    The following is republished from the Tech Times #156.

    If support for web standards in browsers is improving slowly, 
    then support in email clients is moving at a glacial pace. 
    Attempts to document things like CSS support in the major 
    email clients have revealed a depressing state of affairs, but 
    with recent desktop clients like Thunderbird now sitting on 
    solid rendering engines, things have been looking up.

    All that changed when Microsoft dropped a lump of coal into 
    every web developer´s stocking with the end-of-year release to 
    business customers, and the upcoming consumer release, of 
    Outlook 2007. 

    ...

    But late last month, a thread in the SitePoint Forums caught 
    my eye. Microsoft had published a pair of articles describing 
    the support for HTML and CSS in Outlook 2007, and the news 
    wasn´t good:

        Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses the HTML parsing 
    and rendering engine from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to 
    display HTML message bodies. The same HTML and cascading 
    style sheets (CSS) support available in Word 2007 is 
    available in Outlook 2007. 

    The limitations imposed by Word 2007 are described in detail 
    in the article, but here are a few highlights:

        * no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
        * no support for forms
        * no support for Flash, or other plugins
        * no support for CSS floats
        * no support for replacing bullets with images in 
    unordered lists
        * no support for CSS positioning
        * no support for animated GIFs

    In short, unless your HTML emails are very, very simple, 
    you´re going to run into problems with Outlook 2007, and in 
    most cases the only solution to those problems will be to 
    reduce the complexity of your HTML email design to accommodate 
    Outlook´s limited feature set.

    With the release of Outlook 2007, Microsoft is effectively 
    adding an entirely new rendering engine to the mix-one that 
    designers producing HTML email will not be able to ignore.

    Not only that, but this new rendering engine isn´t any better 
    than that which Outlook previously used-indeed, it´s far 
    worse. With this release, Outlook drops from being one of the 
    best clients for HTML email support to the level of Lotus 
    Notes and Eudora, which, in the words of Campaign Monitor´s 
    David Grenier, "are serial killers making our email design 
    lives hell."

    Why on earth would Microsoft do such a thing? Security? 
    Microsoft has been shouting from the rooftops about the new 
    security model in Internet Explorer 7 that prevents the nasty 
    security issues that have plagued Outlook in the past. It 
    seems Microsoft doesn´t buy its own publicity, however, 
    because this move sends the message that Internet Explorer´s 
    security model is not to be trusted.

...

    ... you may want to consider giving your Outlook-based readers 
    an easy way to switch to text-only email.

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-- 
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http://www.lexacorp.com.pg
Information Technology Consultancy, Software Development,System Support.





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