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New Outlook Won't Use IE To Render HTML
loconet writes to tell us about a little surprise coming in Outlook 2007: it will render HTML email using the MS Word engine, dropping the use of IE for this purpose. This represents a body-check to the movement towards Web standards. Whatever you think about HTML email, lots of it gets generated, and those generating it won't be able to use CSS any more, and may stop pushing for more widespread standards support. The announcement was made on MSDN. From the Campaign Monitor post: "Imagine for a second that the new version of IE7 killed off the majority of CSS support and only allowed table based layouts. The web design world would be up in arms! Well, that's exactly what the new version of Outlook does to email designers."
But why should the job title "e-mail designer" even exist? Why does e-mail even need design? The point is to get in, communicate, and get out. Making the presentation of this communication unusually attractive is for PDFs and for advertisements.
Email designers?
Email designers?
Really?
It has ALWAYS used Word to render the HTML.
And if it DID change from this to IE, the geeks would be complaining the same -- because IE is a lot more tied to the system than Word.
Beyond this, the items that don't get rendered are good things -- for *EMAIL*.
I don't want someone being able to play with images too much. I don't want messages sent to me fucking with the positions. I don't want Javascript running in my email. I don't want forms that could potentially read the rest of my inbox available (if the JS were activated that geeks are getting up in arms about).
Almost everything that Word doesn't do are features I don't want my email reader to do.
Then again, I read my mail in plain text. I don't use Windows, I'm on a Mac right now using Foxfire (I don't like safari). My business lives off of BSD and Linux for our servers. And fucking shit...I'm having to defend Microsoft on this.
is the tool of the devil! Maybe this would finally kill it off completely, and as another benefit, it won't be vulnerable to IE exploits.
HTML e-mail is blight anyway. I prefer to read e-mail that is formatted like an extremely long instant message, though ideally without the stupid abbreviations. Now this would actually help me if I bothered to use Outlook anywhere but work.
Isn't this a good thing? Exploits in the IE engine will not be able to be exploited through email. IMHO, emails should be text based with little formatting and the CSS and image heavy content should be on a web page. I know that people will disagree with me, but I believe it is a good thing.
Keith
I'm a staunch web standards supporter and think email should be plain text. It's not a standards issue (certainly not a web standards issue), it's a stupidity issue and Microsoft switching to a word processor control over trident is just the latest glorious example.
Interesting. I wonder if this marks the beginning of a move away from IE for Microsoft.
http://outcampaign.org/
That'd be that there are "email designers"...
Deleted
Is this not similar to the way Gmail (or any other web based e-mail for that matter) deals with CSS? From a quick look at TFA I noticed it's very similar to the constraints posed on Gmail; no relative spacing, no background image support... take a look at this page: http://www.xavierfrenette.com/articles/css-support -in-webmail/
So, really, nothing new here. It's not like other clients aren't just as bad.
I only ever send plain text e-mail, and expect the same from human correspondents. However, I also receive notifications from eBay, newsletters from Apple, and so on: in all of those, HTML is quite useful. Since Outlook seems to be the IE of mail clients, having its HTML/CSS support crippled is actually bad news.
Despite all of its problems, IE has been used, abused & exploited for quite a long time. Many of its bugs have been found & fixed. Is the HTML renderer of Word any safer?
Wonder if this is more of a solution to improve the security of outlook rather than a nefarious plan to destroy html based email, the less you have to do the less of a concern there is (browsers need to support the latest, craziest cutting-edge stuff out there, emails probably don't need to)
it will become harder for others to send me megabyte emails whose only content is a meeting time and date, I'm all for it.
:wq
Now Microsoft will have TWO HTML renderers to debug and maintain. They had enough trouble with one.
Now we'll see exploits for IE and exploits for Outlook's renderer.
They've made the rendering part of the OS. If you cannot replace it with a different one, at least all of their apps should rely upon the same, built-in, OS functionality.
Are you using links back to website for the graphics, which break in certain email apps ... or are you including the graphics in the email, thus making the email messages very large?
At least IE has had a very large amount of field testing to shake out exploits. Word has had some but not nearly as much especally WRT HTML rendering.
...think of the Active-X & VB H4x0rs!!!
There are legitimate uses for HTML mail (think newsletters that people actually subscribe to because they want to stay informed). Unfortunately, just like anything -- on the internet or otherwise -- those that seek to abuse the system end up ruining it for everyone.
That aside, if they're trying to fix security problems, they're pretty much throwing the baby out with the bathwater -- there are decided advantages to being able to use CSS and proper markup, even in email (think smaller messages, and messages that "email designers" can craft once and send to many different email clients, rather than returning to the 1990's internet, with the mess of browser-sniffing and crafting the same page multiple ways to please the various browsers).
Ack!
I remember when The Outlook 98 "upgrade" to Outlook 97 first came out. This was the first version of Outlook that had the HTML message type (in addition to the normal RTF and plain text). This was also the first version of outlook to require IE to be installed and one of the first really popular apps to require it. Win95 and Win NT 4 that were popular at the time didn't necessarily have IE. All the PHBs "oohed" and "ahhed" over this version of outlook and insisted they wanted it on all of the computers (besides at the time MS was giving the upgrade away for "free"). Which, of course created one hell of a mess considering we are talking about IE 4.
It is my opinion that an OS bundle should never include a full blown web browser as a mandatory component. With how popular HTML is, it does make sense to include a minimal HTML renderer - one that does not change when the users regular browser changes or is upgraded. I suspect this is what MS is trying to ward off if this is true. With the current versions of Outlook the behavior of its HTML files changes depending on the version of IE installed. Using a separate renderer fixes this. Also since a minimal renderer would not have to implement the ability to render web quirks it could be smaller and easier to audit and keep secure.
Anyway if this is true, this might be a good move. But let's not let Word become part of the OS now, OK?
Seriously, if its HTML its sure to be spam anyway. We don't need it. We don't want it. Send it strait to hell.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
So let's see on my system IE has a dll to render HTML, Firefox renders HTML, and Word/Rest of Office render's HTML. Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose of dll's?
If only the antitrust people had actually been tech savy. Then maybe Microsoft would have been required to have an HTML rendering engine capable of being replaced. This has two major benefits:
1. IE/Firefox/Outlook? Doesn't matter it's just the GUI at that point.
2. Security. If I find a bug in how Windows handles this kind of HTML then there only needs to be one fix. But now it might affect IE, Word, and who knows how many other HTML rendering engines Microsoft has lying around in Windows. And all of them would have to be patched... that's a lot more code churn and makes it a lot more likely that a bug gets patched in one place but not the other 50.
If someone thinks I want to see HTML, they can send me a link to the web page in question. HTML email has been a general disaster.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I've been blocking HTML email from my domain for years.
When I need to create HTML or a template HTML, it is lovingly hand crafted with vi.
It doesn't get emailed and certainly doesn't include images.
Ja, I am an anonymous coward and my users hate me.
nefarious? If that's MS's plan then damnit they should be praised! Praised I tell you
Embrace, extend, and extinguish.
But, fortunately, each version of Word seems to do an equally bad job of rendering previous versions of its own "standard."
I was in a meeting once that got a little heated. Notes had been circulated in advance by the presenter, as Word attachments to email. After some puzzling exchanges, it became clear that one recipient was on the verge of anger because the presenter had apparently failed to include the key information, the discussion of which was the purpose of the meeting.
Finally the presenter said, "But, but, but, it's all in the table on page 2."
The recipient said, "Yeah, right--but all the important entries are... BLANK!" There were murmurs of "hear, hear" from others. Then someone piped up and said "What do you mean blank? They're not blank in my copy."
About half the attendees had good copies; half had copies where the important table entries appeared blank.
The odd part is that the presenter and the recipients with blank tables were all using identical version numbers of Word and of Windows. Some other recipients, also using the same versions of Word and Windows, had accurate copies.
It turned out that a) if the contents of a table cell were too large to fit in the cell, instead of displaying a clipped or truncated version of the text--as anyone would expect--Word simply rendered the cell contents as perfect and absolute blank. Had you known this was happening, you could have edited the table to widen the column, causing the text magically to appear... but who would have guessed this was happening? b) In order to render the table properly, the recipient needed not only to have the same version of Word and of Windows, as the sender, and not only all of the fonts used by the sender, but needed to have his screen set to the same resolution!
I am not really sure how large organizations manage to tolerate Word. I suppose they must be willing to upgrade the entire desktop configuration--Windows, Word, fonts, screen size and all--of everyone in the company all at the exact same time.
P. S. Annoyingly enough, the presenter at one point suggested that all the problems were probably being experienced by Mac users. Fortuitously, as it happened none of the Mac users in fact had experienced problems. This was not a result of intrinsic Mac superiority, just an illustration that Microsoft incompetence strikes utterly at random and is not always directed by Machivellian Redmond strategy.
P. P. S. Yes, this was some years ago. No, I have no idea whether Microsoft has fixed this in current versions. I'm personally running Office 98 under Classic and won't upgrade until I'm forced to. I've spend way too much money on Microsoft "upgrades" that add some spiffy new features, a lot of bling, gratuitously change the shortcuts and screen locations of every functions, while failing to fix any of the actual bugs that drive me nuts. If anyone has a tutorial on how to edit numbered lists and bullet lists in a long document without changes in one list causing dozens of incomprehensible changes to other totally unrelated lists throughout the document, please let me know...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This is fine with me, because HTML email fucking sucks anyway. Maybe if they make it suck even worse, everybody will go back to plain text.
Game... blouses.
I know this is slashdot, and nobody really like Microsoft or read the story, but the summery is wrong.
. aspx is a list of supported css and html in Outlook.
Here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201
The things missing are tags such as form and object, and some javascript support, but nobody is going to blame microsoft for not supporting onClick in emails. And yes tables are supported.
Dear Sir,
Go Fück Yourself. Your profession is responsible for designing all the corporate spam I receive, therefore you deserve this red-hot poker up your årse
Best wishes
C
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Thanks for this anecdote! This is the best proof that Word is NOT a document-exchange format.
Isn't that what MS wants? To hijack the standards (any) and make their own the de facto one? Since the mid to late 80's.
Email is a text-only, ultra-reliable, easily-archivable and printable means of text communication. HTML should have never been allowed in the first place and I still reject it, whenever I get it. This design-fetisch some people have is not only completely counterproductiove, it diminishes the worth of the medium itself by removing the attributes I listed in the beginning.
Binary attachments are ok, but not as the message itself.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A single 500KB message is not a problem.
I have over 10,000 messages in my mail box. Now you can see the problem? And I'm just one person. On a network, this can quickly become a major issue.
Think of the problem with 1,000 employees, with 5,000-10,000 messages each at a company.
Not to mention that spammers love this because they can get this past the spam filters very easily.
Why not use Frontpage Expression Web or Sharepoint? Oh, are they not included in Office? This can't be for real. I'm appalled that Word doesn't support CSS, but if MS really plans to use an HTML renderer that is so far from being standards-compliant for Office, how can they hope to be competitive? (yes, I agree that HTML mail is silly and bloated, but many people still like it on some level)
Let me guess... the people having the problems were using a different printer from the people who had no problems.
Windows font metrics (and thus, rendering in Word) depend on the actual printer resolution. Yes, your truetype fonts will change size with different printers. The effect is subtle, but it causes changes in pagination and can cause things to overflow slightly in tables. Mac OS doesn't do this (and afaik, never has).
This is why Word may give you "Unable to retrieve printer information" if you are opening a document. What a terrible, terrible idea.
How in the fuck did you manage to misspell "summary" twice, each time with a different spelling? You must be special.
I set all my computers to only accept plain text. If I want dancing monkeys in the background then I'll go to Gibraltar.
My little Linux and tech blog
The only problem like this I've ever had with KMail (a KDE-based mail client) was with a Flash plugin which totally borked the web browsers. Yes, plural. Everything that had a Flash plugin died when pointed at this particular Telstra website. Some of them thoroughly enugh to require a KILL.
PDFs, DOCs et al all open jess fahrn through the appropriate helper application (xpdf/ghostview, OpenOffice, whatever).
OTOH, many Windows-centered customers have had machines & even entire networks trashed after opening the wrong email attachment. "Wrong" here is defined as "looks like a usual one, reads like a usual one... but ain't" rather than anything completely off-the-wall (although those, too are typically virus/spyware farms).
HTML is the least of your worries here; the concept of MS-Word opening attachments & stuff like that is a bit of a nightmare.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I don't care because the only "designed" email I get is sent from spammers or has a virus/trojan attached.
If MS chose to toss out html email entirely and go to either plain or rich text, that would also be just fine with me, because I don't remember hearing about anyone having their computer taken over by security holes a text file and notepad. If this switch enhances security, then that's great too.
But.. I've done it. I've manually encoded html with embedded images for sending to a client that used HTML emails internally, impressed the client and got some benefit from that.
sigh... I must be a bad, bad man.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Whew! No changes for us at least!
Regards,
-Useless Twerp
eBay.com
The only MS software that could be worse than IE has got to be Word, which is the most horrible piece of software ever written by man (given that Lotus Notes was written by some kind of invertebrate). This is lovely, the new Outlook will take 2 minutes to start, and crash while you're writing a message, and autorecover won't work, and you'll spend 30 minutes trying to get autonumber to work.
Good thing I've been using Thunderbird for 3 years.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The kicker comes when you modify one of the instances. Word takes that to mean that you're modifying not just that instance, but the definition of the Style. So every other instance changes too.
The solution is to explicitly create a Style for each layout you want to use, and invoke it explicitly. Microsoft REALLY wants you to use Styles. After all, it's more efficient to format with Styles. And that makes it a best practice. And everyone knows Microsoft is all about best practices.
But you repeat yourself. (+1, Redundant :)
Destroying HTML email is increasing the security of email clients.
(The proper way to handle HTML email is to cancel the article, then hire a hitman to kill the poster, his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his computer into little bits. Anything more is just extremism.)
People were upset that Microsoft was bundling Internet Explorer too deeply in the OS.
Now, they've found a way to sever one of their products, MS Office, away from IE, at least for this purpose, so Internet Explorer is no longer required for Office users to render email.
I would think Slashdotters would consider this a Good Thing(tm).
For my own personal and business communications, i use plain text for my e-mail 100% of the time. In the 1-in-a-million case that I need something more, I attach a PDF. I hate SPAM. However, there are a few company advertisements that I have opted to receive because they actually deal with things of interest to me. I don't mind getting a Paizo publishing newsletter in my e-mail, I'm often interested to know what new products they're carrying and what new books are out. Ditto for NewEgg. These, by definition, are not SPAM, because I opted to receive them, and they will stop sending them to me if I ask. How do we reconcile the two conflicting goals? I don't know.
Part of my job is to send out advertising email to our confirmed, double opt-in, easy opt-out email list (see, i'm not evil) and I send plain text and html emails depending on their signup options.
Two comments. 1) I did cross browser testing on all the major web-based email providers and a couple clients and found CSS support is so bad it was unusable - WE NEVER COULD USE CSS IN HTML EMAILS! At least not in the real world. Maybe in a corporate environement where you know the client each user will use. I forget but I think AOL was the real kicker, possibly hotmail as well.
2) HTML email is a necessary evil, and at this point, I'd be happy if I could just ditch plain text alltogether. I'm advertising for nightclubs, plain text emails just don't appeal to people as much as pretty pictures. Yes, geeks are fine with text, but the rest of the non-geek world out there responds a hell of a lot better to pics.
closed minded is as closed minded does
This is good. It's a break for all of us who do not use windows, but receive the same crap. It's a break for all of us who hate HTML email. It's a break for all of us who don't need a webpage in our email.
:)
Let's look at the positively good things about this:
- Increased security (less monoculture is good).
- Increased diversity (more rendering methods means that people have to adapt to support more stuff, probably minimalistic - which is good).
- Hopefully less stupid HTML mail.
- Hopefully the title "email designer" will never be used again.
All in all - womnderfull news!
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
The same is true of HTML.
Oh, and in case you've been on a different planet recently: http://secunia.com/advisories/23666/As I understand this Secunia report, it describes a defect in a specific product made by Adobe Systems, not an inherent flaw in PDF. Does Foxit Reader have the same problem? What about Mac OS X's built-in viewer? What about GSview?
Now MS Windows users don't have to worry about emails running hostile Javascript or ActiveX controls unsandboxed with full privileges. Now emails will be able to run hostile BASIC MS Word macros unsandboxed with full privileges instead. I bet they feel safer already.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What is that "e-mail" that you speak of? And who needs it anyway? We're perfectly happy with TELEX-messages (link), thank you very much; in fact we can even send "Multimedia" (RING-A-DING-DING) with just one byte!
OK, I kid, I kid...
Of course I don't like (or deem necessary) "rich" or "HTML"-mail either, yet it's here, it's here to stay, and we have to deal with it. So I'm happy for any Mail-Client that's able to properly display "designed" e-mail (without choking or getting infections), and (obviously) for anyone who can properly "design" such an e-mail (ie: make it look interesting without being completely obnoxious).
rattatta...rattatta...rattta...rattatta... RING-A-DING-DING-DING-DING-DING... rattata.
sig? Oh, that sig...
Apple Mail in Leopard is supposed to feature very rich html-based e-mail. The e-mails produced are actually very nice looking. Check out http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/mail.html Rest assured that if the typical Windows user got an e-mail like that she'd be all like: "that's stunning -- how can I produce an e-mail like that". I'm sure Apples is using standard compliant HTML and CSS for their layouts -- at least they do with their iWeb application. By killing good HTML-based e-mail they divert attention from the fact that their own e-mail applications kinda suck in comparison.
Rattata? Can it be upgraded into Raticate?
Considering Outlook is distributed as part of Office, doesn't it make sense that it use an HTML rendering engine distributed with Office? Isn't this a step toward giving people the option of an IE-free Windows?
Outlook has been using word to render opened emails and edit emails by default for a few versions now (but not for preview, afaik). So the news is they pulled the option to render/edit using IE? The HTML support is somewhat more limited but still perfectly capable of color, fonts, tables, and images? CSS for emails??? Do you complain that slashdot posts can't use the full gamut of HTML features that are possible for web pages?
Email is a different medium, and a more limited set of HTML is appropriate. I'm sure that's not the reason they did this - they did it to have one less dependency and to drop a feature few were still using (i.e. changing their default email renderer to IE). As a bonus, by using a different renderer they make it harder for people to write one-size-fits-all exploits - plenty of email clients will still use IE, but Outlook won't. An exploit targetted at IE won't get in through outlook and an exploit targetted at word won't get in through Windows Mail or many other non Microsoft mail clients that use IE.
Word offeres substantially better editing capabilities than the IE editable HTML control; this is why it has been the default for composing mail for some time. The only reason IE was used in the first place was because it was more lightweight than embedding an instance of Word; it might still be, but the cost of running word is now less of an issue than the benefit of getting the Word editor.
The greatest gotcha ever.
Once upon a time, I was in college. We had rooms of identical computers in the labs, and two different types of printers. We also had the library, with computers and one of those printer types.
What did this translate to? If you did the work the library, and printed it in some of the labs, your formatting would be off. In others you'd have no problem.
In those computer labs, during classes that had and things to print and turn in, there'd always be someone who walked in with the document to print and spent a hurried five minutes fixing their paragraphs not to changes pages in the middle, because they did it in the library. And in the other labs, about half the time you'd run into the same problem, because they did it in the other lab.
Some of the students figured out you could switch your printer to another room's printer and print them correctly...assuming you could find an empty room to print in, as teachers started getting upset at people coming into their class to collect printouts. There usually was one, the school tried to keep at least one lab open, but it was a crapshot if they had the right kind of printer.
Then people started forgetting to change printers back, so people who'd figured out what was going on would prepare a document in a single room, and print it there, only to discover their printer was set elsewhere, and then switch it back, only to discover their formatting was off. It didn't help that this process would sometimes be interrupted by a random angry teacher, who, pissed that people were printing in their classroom, had snatched their misprint off the printer and tracked down the person who'd printed it. (The name and class were usually on there.)
It was total and complete chaos the entire time I went there, because of dumbass Microsoft and their brilliant formatting-changes-with-the-printer idea. The official policy was 'Check the printer every day before you start, and only work on formatting in the lab you're going to print in', but college students and rules do not go together.
Me? I used Open Office on my laptop, 'printed' off a PDF, stuck it online, and printed from within IE, after making sure the printer was right. (IIRC, people usually changed it within Word, so everything else still printed to the right printer.) If I needed to mail a Word document, instead of turn one in, I'd export to Word format, stick it up online, view it within IE to make sure it was okay, and mail it from my laptop.
I did, at one point, manage to get my laptop logging onto their network so I could use the printers, but it was a huge hassle and I soon gave up on that.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Outlook not good!
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
Does this smell like embrace, extend, extinguish to anyone else?
Things that have received a lot of attention in the past year or two are Open Office / ODF, Google search and gmail, and Firefox. Obviously, if the trend continues and more people move to a non-MS browser and non-MS apps, the possibility for users to choose a non-MS OS increases.
My company uses Novell Groupwise for email, and one of the biggest complaints of new employees (who are pretty much all used to Outlook) is that they can't seamlessly use Word as a mail editor. Obviously a great deal of HTML mail is being created in Word, so what better place to render it than Word? This would allow MS to make changes in Word's HTML engine that would render fine on another MS box with Outlook/Word, but not on other platforms.
MS was blindsided when it came to the ways we would use the web, and could use this as a way to steal it back. With Word's built-in HTML engine, they could potentially do away with IE and make Word the web browser. For MS shops, this would have the added bonus of allowing them to use a web repository for document storage and Word as the editor/browser for massaging docs, and over a period of time discontinue support for old-fashined HTML. With OOXML being pushed by MS as the new "open standard," MS will have a hiding place from anti-trust problems, and OOXML could forcefully become a de-facto standard for email and the web.
Google search - replaced by Ctrl-F
gmail - Google could pay to have an OOXML parser written for their needs, but would they?
OpenOffice - Improvements to the software will take a backseat to implementing a not-perfect OOXML filter.
Firefox - Battling Word instead of IE, but due to the same reasons.
The headline and summary are 99% wrong.
Outlook 2007 supports HTML and CSS quite well. Many of you should know this, as you've had the chance to beta test it for about a year now. I have, and all of the HTML newsletters I subscribe to look just fine in Outlook.
In fact, Microsoft has even gone a step further and provided a free CSS/HTML validator that developers can use to make sure their messages will be rendered correctly.
-David
E-mail designer... what a load of ****. E-mail is for sending messages and occasional attachments. It's not a rich development environment to be navigated by a website. I view my mail as text only by default and only flip it to html if I know what it is I'm getting. It's cleaner, faster, and I don't have to see all the crap that advertisers and what not put into it.
Given the demographic of people on /. does anyone actually use outlook for email here? And outlook with HTML enabled? I'd think the probability of that happening would be around 0.001.
Has it occurred to you that the "nothing but positive response" may be because all the intelligently administered sites are shit-canning your HTML emails before they reach actual users? I used to get bulletins from Magnetic North, Inc. but they stopped a year or so back - er, no they didn't really, they just started sending elaborate HTML messages that couldn't reach me since no regulated site can possibly allow mail that hotlinks a dozen remote images and includes ten .gif attachments!
Any really glitzy HTML sales pitch is programmatically indistinguishable from spam, kapische?
Our mail system tosses hundreds of 'em every day. YOU ARE LOSING SALES DUMMY...
I second the thanks for that. The whole ./ discussion has thus far been about the merits of HTML mail. You can love it or hate it - that is fine. But if if HTML mail is to be supported at all it needs to be supported in some sort of standards based way that won't screw people over. I realize that there is no standard for HTML mail and there is no obvious path to get there from here. The state we are in now is where each email client has a different set of quirks and those who produce HTML email content have to just deal with it. In the web page word things have gotten better. IE7 is closer to standards compliance and it is getting much easier to make a web page that will display the same everywhere.
So why would Microsoft make a move that puts us years behind on the goal of having standards for HTML mail. I just don't understand their thinking on this.
The things missing are tags such as form and object, and some javascript support, but nobody is going to blame microsoft for not supporting onClick in emails. And yes tables are supported.
... and those things defeat formats now working and set M$ users back five years just like the summary says. Dillo displays better than that but, sanely for a restricted browser, does not use scripting. The article took less time to read than the list of "features" now supported, you might give it a look.
The funniest thing about this is that it showed me that html email could be useful. I'd never seen an html email I liked before I looked at their before and after images. 100% of the html formated email I've gotten so far has been a waste of the sender's time and would have been easier to read as plain text.
Kmail does it right. It shows the text of the message with a button that says something like "press here if you trust the sender and would like to this rendered." It works great.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not a chance... remember that the html rendering in word has always been hooked into all the IE functions and libs/(dlls). I think you will find that Word will just use IE for css anyway and links will be followed through IE with no way to change the system preferences for firefox users. Could be that to screw over the use of firefox in the business world Microshaft will just make it harder to follow email links with anything other than IE.
This is interesting component naming by Microsoft. You can install Outlook 2007 without installing Word 2007 (same for previous versions). This means the rendering engine is a shared Office suite component and not a Word 2007 feature just like other shared components such as Office Web Components (OWC). It is probably used the *most* by Word but (one can assume) it would also be used in Excel and Powerpoint etc.
Yes, tables *CAN* be done *IN PLAIN TEXT*... as long as you use fixed fonts. If you want to send me a f***ing typeset document, print it out and stick the pages in an envelope and courier it to me.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
There's a reason we call it "LookOut!" rather than Outlook. Microsoft's main "innovation" in email was to take the early 1990s' "Good Times" hoax and make it real. Allowing incoming mail to be executed by reading or even previewing it was truly, deeply, incredibly awful.
HTML mail is evil as is. Email as we know it is obsolete -- designed in 1972 for the closed ARPAnet, it is a spam-ridden kludge today -- but the original plain text design remains the safest way to use it. HTML "styled" mail is bad, an unnecessary kludge, but there are occasional reasons to use it, I suppose. Otherwise if a full HTML rendering is needed, better to provide an URL and let the user click on it. But of course Microsoft, using Internet Exploder within its mail readers, went and did the clicking for the reader, allowing easy installation of spyware. Just the mere fact that the message fetched a picture, or an invisible web bug, tells the spammer that the address was valid.
Personally, I usually read email in Eudora, with "use Microsoft viewer" turned OFF and fetching pictures in HTML mail turned OFF. (Sadly, Qualcomm made the defaults the opposite, making it spammer-friendly out of the box, but easy enough to fix.) Kmail is also quite good about using the plain text, and warning about HTML while still allowing it to be read if necessary.
So who loses if HTML rendering is degraded? Hmmm, who was the original post's article written by? Campaignmonitor.com . Who are they? SPAMMERS! They run "email marketing campaigns" for their clients! If they're complaining, then for once Microsoft may, amazingly, be doing the right thing. Campaignmonitor's sample shows the fetched external graphics in Outlook 2000 replaced by a warning box in Outlook 2007. Good! This may almost make Outlook safe to use! Well, I'm sure it has other security problems, but hey...
My title is not "email designer" but it is one of my job functions and this is Bad News. I know not everyone loves html email, and I respect that, but the emails we send to our thoroughly opted in existing customers are appreciated and get positive feedback. But without starting that fight, this is very serious news.
A big chunk of the stuff that's not supported looks like things that impact display behaviors, some of which might make users feel more secure. It's cover for MS, being able to point to properties like background (only when there is a URL), media ( screen | print | projection | braille | speech | all ), onblur, onchange, onclick, ondblclick, onfocus, onload, onmousedown, onmousemove, onmouseover and say "look, these cause behaviors that 3rd parties could use to exploit your computer or at the very least, cause something to happen that you weren't expecting" and then describe the worst case scenario of a user's computer being "forced to do something" without them clicking, such as "onmouseover." They can point to these things, some of which sound unnerving to the average person, and say, look we're making it impossible for spammers to make your computer do things you don't want it to do.
But then they go after background-position, background-repeat, clear, display, float, list-style-image, list-style-position, etc. Ugh. These things make it so easy to improve the look of my emails, while lightening the amount of code markedly. I can't imagine the weight of tables based emails! And the room for mistakes, the multiplication of errors...I can't wait til I'm delayed sending a critical piece while searching for two hours for a missing or somesuch. The horror. The horror.
Sure great, it protects the user from "malware". It does nothing to make the user feel like he or she lives in the 21st Ceut. /p?
yes. that's all I'm going to say in all comments from now on.
The poorly framed pictures on a postcard do not overflow a buffer in your brain, causing you to spontaneously send out truckloads of postcards containing the compromised picture and inducing you to be highly suggestible to the advances of complete strangers.
The vast majority of people who receive postal mail do not have an agent that "previews" all of their postal mail, even from random strangers, and slavishly executes all the instructions contained within it.
In short, yes, If I were designing email today, I would allow attachments but require messages be entirely text. And if I were designing the email filter, all attached files of any format would be forcibly transcoded to another format. That way the failure is more likely to occur in the restricted access filter computer than on the recipient's presumably useful computer.
That said, I live in the world as it is, and I compete to win.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
for your new sig. Vista has shipped unfortunately.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Fuck email designers. Use text like everyone else, you latte-slurping assholes.
Without even opening it, the first letter makes me think "bill", "credit card statement" or "tax refund" - therefore I'd better open it, read it and file it.
The second one, without even opening it, makes me think "junk mail" and invariably goes straight in the rubbish bin without me even opening it.
This conclusively shows why HTML is bad and a waste of time.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
More like making the move to DRM e-mail. Going through McWerd means IRM/DRM and you have to check in with MS to do anything with any one message. Next step is to give warning messages and / or lock out regular nan-MS e-mail
HTML and McWerd mail definitely hurt there. Most spam filters route it to the shitcan unseen and unread. And as mentioned by other posts here, HIPAA, SOX or FDA regulated workplaces must shitcan HTML messages and mail with Word attachments. So if you're serious about reaching those people, then sending a text summary with a URL will do the job faster and better. Afterall, which is better at rendering, a client program specialized in processing e-mail or a client program program specialized in rendering documents?
Furthermore, the HTTP protocol is much more efficient at transferring images and documents linking to images, for mail it has to be run through base64 encode/decode at both ends and in between sits all bloated taking space in the hard disk where the inbox resides.
Whenever there's a debate like this, let people choose.
When they sign up a prominent link which says "click here to receive HTML emails".
(You didn't send it without a sign-up did you?)
On a related note, does anybody really need CSS in an email...?
No sig today...
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Oh, I understand the impact this will cause in those poor Microsoft Outlook users. If only someone had warned them about Microsoft!
.gif when you need it?)
Wait... somebody did warn... oh, it was us! That's the reason I use Thunderbird in a Microsoft-ridden organization.
Now, now, where's the champagne? Don't worry, I know German enough to write "Schadenfreude".
Let me direct some words of encouragement to my fellow friends, the Windows users: "I told ya!" Is Windows using & developing easy enough for you, now? Can you hear me now?
At least you can play those excellent games instead of reading email, huh?
Have a nice day!
(Where's that dancing banana
Ah, yes, the little joys in life: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/banana.php
Microsoft, Windows and Outlook are trademarks of Microsoft, I believe. Fortunately, I have nothing to do with them!
> This represents a body-check to the movement towards Web standards.
Oh, yeah, sure, because if Outlook doesn't support a standard, then we obviously can't use it on the web, since Outlook is one of the most popular web browsers.
Idiot.
The preferred way to handle HTML mail is for the SMTP server to respond with 554 unacceptable content type. Barring that, it can be filtered out after receipt. 100.0003% of HTML mail is unsolicited junkmail. Occasionally a misguided user with a misconfigured newsreader posts something on usenet that is otherwise legitimate and posts in HTML format by mistake, but I am not aware of a single documented instance of this happening in email.
Even if you don't trust this and are afraid that you might someday get a piece of important mail in HTML format and want to check each and every one, you wouldn't want the HTML rendered. That would be totally unnecessary, not to mention risky. You'd want the HTML markup stripped out, leaving just the text.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Enabled in my mimedefang-filter:
remove_redundant_html_parts($entity);
Ok, there are those douchebags that don't ever send a text/plain part at all still *sigh*. Worse are people who use HTML markup in messages that are content-type text/plain. Grrrrr!
Anybody who is doing HTML "design" of email messages, on a professional basis, is by definition a spammer and deserves to lose. Email is not for marketing messages.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they choosing to render html in Outlook using Word to ensure that the appearance of the email as a whole doesn't suddenly alter when one replies to a html email and begins editing that html in Word?
I'm pretty sure that it's a lot more easier to code html editing when the same engine is used to edit the html and render the results, else one will get a lot of incongruities between the appearance of the email while you're editing it, and the email while you're viewing it that can only be fixed by tweaking the Word html rendering to exactly match the IE html rendering.
I am extremely suspicious of that statement.
CSS is supported in all modern versions of Word. Maybe it's not the latest and greatest CSS, but at least Word has basic CSS support.
Does somebody actually have proof that e-mail using the Word HTML engine will not support CSS?
- They already use Word to compose messages in Outlook 2003 (and probably earlier), so why would they have used a different engine to render the messages?
-
Why even have two different rendering engines in the first place?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I would think the word "code reuse" should have occurred to MS a long time ago. Then again, I don't doubt the corporate gears grind slowly -- better late than never, you know.I totally agree with you. After R'ing TFA I couldn't spot a single element, attribute or CSS property that they are not supporting that I'd want to use when sending an HTML email. The elements and attributes that have been dropped seem to fall into two camps:
- Those used to make a page interactive - onclick attributes, form elements and so forth.
- Things used to hide stuff on a web page - td colwidth=0 and tr colheight=0 for example.
It seems to me that they are mostly droppinig features whose main users are spammers and phishers, although there are a few things that I can't see an immediate reason for not wanting to support - CSS background-image and the img alt attribute for example.
lots of people will complain that outlook doesn't render email correctly and MS will have to fix the problems.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
... with MS Word bugs -- just after MS made the almost-forced upgrade to IE7 (with all its alleged security improvements).
Methinks someone is off-message in Redmond, and is about to catch a chair with his/her head.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
HTML is for web pages.
Plain ASCII text is for email.
Stop putting HTML in email. Then it can be used by everyone for its only really useful purpose, which is indicating than an email is spam.
Then use style="width:2em" which defines the size of the image in terms of the size of the surrounding text. As of Gran Paradiso (precursor to Mozilla Firefox 3.0), this scaling no longer uses the blocky PlayStation 1 style "nearest neighbor" algorithm; instead, it uses bilinear interpolation.
Stop using outlook for email.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Most web mail systems I've played with put serious restrictions on HTML mail, usually in the interest of sand-boxing them from the overall webmail interface. Many of these (Hotmail, Yahoo... possibly Gmail?) take out CSS-P elements and put certain restrictions on inline CSS. "Email designers" have long had to test "special" web standards for HTML-based email because, even more so than browsers themselves, these interfaces create additional restrictions that are rarely documented or standards-based.
This isn't to say that I like the decision, but it is certainly par for the course of email rendering.
"Imagine for a second that the new version of Slashdot killed off the majority of CSS support and only allowed table based layouts. The web design world would be up in arms! Well, that's exactly what the CURRENT version of Slashdot does to Forum Response Designers."
Ok, maybe that's taking this too far. But honestly, talking about web standards: what is and how can it be qualified as HTML?