Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
I think it is time for us old farts to give up this fight, and admit we lost--and that we lost because we were actually on the wrong side.
Consider regular mail. The kind you put on paper and send in an envelope via the post office. If I were sending someone a regular mail asking them, say, about a strange spike in bandwidth usage last Tuesday, I would, naturally, include a graph showing bandwidth usage for the week. And if I also mentioned that the new server rack was in place, I might include a photo, either separately in the envelope, or inline in the letter.
Now let's imagine email had never been invented, and we just came up with the idea. How would we design an email system? I think we'd think it obvious that we have to make it at least as capable as regular mail, and would probably come up with an HTML body plus attachments as the format (for portability, as opposed to word processor formats). I think there is zero chance we'd say "wait a minute...we'd better make this plain text only, because 25 years ago, many computers did not have graphical displays".