Gustav Brock
Gustav at cactus.dk
Thu Jan 11 03:58:10 CST 2007
Thanks Stuart
One more reason to avoid HTML e-mail.
/gustav
>>> stuart at lexacorp.com.pg 11-01-2007 02:52 >>>
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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