Microsoft, you cannot be serious!

Ok, so Outlook 2010 is set to inherit the same Microsoft Word rendering engine as used in Outlook 2007 and frankly, the one in Outlook 2007 is rubbish. For those of you who don't design and build HTML emails, this is very bad news because trying to get even the simplest of designs working in Outlook 2007, can quite simply take hours of fudging around. This is because the Word HTML rendering engine is fundamentally 'broken', failing to support many of the HTML and CSS standards that have now been in place for quite some time.

The idea of these web standards is to promote an industry standard for software companies, like Microsoft, to follow in their implementations of how HTML is rendered in the browser through CSS styling. The same standards that Microsoft has now started to comprehensively adopt in their latest two Internet Explorer releases (IE7 and IE8).

Why then is Microsoft refusing to ensure that their flagship email client is released with a thorough and solid support for standards compliant HTML and CSS?

On Wednesday last week, thousands of people, designers and developers alike, made their protests through the http://fixoutlook.org campaign. As a result Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Office Communications and Forms Team made his response. And it wasn't good news for folk like us - they won't be fixing Outlook 2010. Of particular concern is the following snippet from William Kennedy's post:

'There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products.'

I'm amazed by this comment. What sort of 'consensus' does Microsoft need? For me, this sort of response from Microsoft show's little respect for the genuine and well-meaning requests of thousands of developers who are just like me - we simply wish to be able to code with HTML and CSS in a standards compliant way and thus be reasonably sure that our clients won't see their content break or behave unpredictably.

I can appreciate that a 'subset' of HTML might need 'refining' over time to make it as suitable for email client use as possible (especially when you take into account the difficulties of HTML content needing to be delivered through web-based clients), but there is a bottom line here - there are no wheels to reinvent - Internet Explorer 7 and especially IE8 prove that Microsoft have the know-how and willingness to make floats work as they should; they know how unordered lists should display their margins, padding and other attributes and they certainly know that HTML should no longer rely on tables for successful layout. And as for background images…!

As far as I'm concerned, this is lame. For me, the criticism of the Word rendering engine in Outlook 2007 is more than justified and those people complaining need to be heard - they are the people who are daily battling to get the simplest of HTML rendered designs to work for Microsoft clients - the users of their software that Microsoft supposedly cares so much for.

If Outlook 2010 is just as bad as Outlook 2007 in its support for HTML and CSS, I can see Microsoft getting into the exact same mess they got into with IE6 and its continued poor support for web standards. Designers and developers will tire of finding the extra time needed to get things working. Clients (many of them Microsoft's customers) will be unwilling to pay the higher bills needed to pay designers and developers like us to put extra time into Outlook 2010. Ultimately, the experience for Outlook users will inevitably suffer, even if they can create pretty graphs in Word and email them!

Perhaps there is an equivalent to conditional comments for Outlook, and if there is, us developers will probably head down the road of recommending the serving of a text-only version of HTML emails to Microsoft's flagship email client version if we want to move HTML design forward!

All very daft and very unnecessary.