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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."
TFA complains that the new Word rendering engine in Outlook doesn't support very much CSS, and fancy e-mail designs will have to use table-based layouts.
On a completely unrelated note, all Microsoft's e-mail newsletters use table-based layouts.
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What the hell is it with the hair shirt brigade?
Do you whine and whinge about graphics and layout on webpages? No, you whine and whinge about people NOT using CSS. You even get up in arms about badly constructed CSS webpages not rendering correctly (Acid2).
Well guess what. For certain purposes how an email looks is very important - at least as important as what it says. Using the same standard for that is used for webpages makes a vast amount of sense. Thus this move by Microsoft is another f*ck y*u to those that want some sanity and consistancy in approach.
You want to send text only email, then send text only emails. But don't start whine about those that need and use more.