molly.com
Thursday 18 January 2007
What Really Happened with HTML and CSS in Outlook 2007
People working with HTML email have always had under-represented voices in the way various software vendors implement HTML and CSS into their mail software. Recently, Microsoft Outlook 2007 has made major changes to the way Outlook renders email, and developers are naturally, and understandably concerned.
To that end I took the question to colleagues at Microsoft in order to see what I could find out. I have to admit that after having been so focused on working with IE7 and other prioritizations, it never occurred to me or anyone else at WaSP in the Microsoft / WaSP Task Force to even ask about rendering in Office products. What a kerfuffle, as Lou would tell Andy in Little Britain.
As it turns out, in past versions, Outlook used two rendering engines. IE’s for reading content, and Word for composing messages. What this meant was that if you were replying or forwarding HTML emails, previous versions of Outlook would first use IE’s rendering engine to view it, then would switch over to the compose engine, Word.
While wrangling this is a no-brainer for Web designers and developers accustomed to working with a variety of tools, typical users were finding enough inconsistencies between what they were creating and what they were receiving that it became apparent the rendering and editing engines should be the same. This makes sense from a programmatic as well as use standpoint in the long term as well.
So, the IE engine was removed and the updated Word engine is now serving both needs within Outlook 2007. Of course, some stuff is breaking. Fortunately, there’s some documentation to help designers and developers know just what is and isn’t supported in Outlook 2007, at least theoretically. No, this isn’t fun news, as it means we’ll be learning what’s problematic as we go, and at worst disrupting our own user/customer relationships.
So when we’re done kicking and screaming over Yet Another Interoperability Muckup that we will have to account for, let us try to dry our tears, put on bandaids where necessary, give magic kisses and plan how we’re going to fix this.
I’m currently gathering and doing some tests to compare what the documentation says and the rendering of Office 2007 actually does. It’ll become a bit clearer where the holes are after we begin to put the software through its paces.
Please comment as to your experiences and include any links to problem cases. I promise to make sure the top priorities and concerns get in front of the right eyes. Microsoft was very clear in letting me know that if we want a feature and need it and get an organized list to them, those issues will be addressed and prioritized as the new engine develops in response to developer needs, too.
See the following sources for more details on which HMTL and CSS standards are and aren’t supported:
Enter your woes and wishes in the comment field below.
Filed under: standards, software, web design and development, WaSP, browsers, microsoft, ie7
Posted by: Molly | 12:25 am |
January 18th, 2007 at 12:38 am
Oy.
I’m reminded of the entirely different rendering engines in IE/Mac and IE/Win, and the problems those inconsistencies caused. And here we are again…
January 18th, 2007 at 12:51 am
I’d suggest you check out Dave Greiner’s excellent article Microsoft takes email design back 5 years for a detailed expert explanation of the whole fiasco
Unfortunately, his comments have been carved up by Digg users, but the early comments and some of the later ones are worthwhile
January 18th, 2007 at 12:56 am
Yeah, that’s a great article Lachlan! I also suspect we’ve only just scratched the surface of problems and inconsistencies, though.
January 18th, 2007 at 1:00 am
As doctor McCoy would say, “Jim, you’re talking about curing the disease by killing the patient!”
The problem: Outlook’s HTML email composition engine can’t display HTML email as well as it’s HTML email display engine.
The solution: replace the email display engine so that HTML email looks equally bad throughout Outlook, and assume that developers will, once again, lower themselves to Microsoft’s lowest common denominator because, after all, they own the market, right?
Imagine if Microsoft decided that the best way to cure the CSS bugs in IE6 would be to release IE7 with the nice, stable, IE4 rendering engine.
January 18th, 2007 at 1:02 am
Ugh. This is making my brain hurt. Hmm.
Having only recently been forced to work on HTML emails, I’d rather see all email clients start supporting HTML properly (or not at all! seriously). MS just seems to want Outlook emails to work in Outlook, ignoring the reality that Outlook is just one email client in the market.
That said, if this situation were to inspire some better HTML output from Word, then I’m all for it
January 18th, 2007 at 1:03 am
This begs the question in my head…. since outlook is used very widely throughout business, and Microsoft finds it more efficient to break backward compatibility there, then what’s stopping them from completely fixing IE’s rendering engine and breaking at least some backward compatibility there? If I remember right, they’ve claimed they can’t do certain things without breaking backward compatibility, as a reason why they won’t fix certain things in IE. This whole Outlook 2007 thing, kind of shatters their argument now.
January 18th, 2007 at 1:18 am
Ben gets it right:
> I’d rather see all email clients start supporting HTML properly (or not at all! seriously).
Seriously.
January 18th, 2007 at 1:26 am
I hate HTML email, for what it’s worth. But that’s another thread. I’ll happily start another page if we feel like arguing that, but I’d prefer if this thread were kept to developer resources, feedback and practical examples and woes related to the topic and free of that little holy war. Thanks my darlings.
January 18th, 2007 at 3:04 am
David Greiner runs the excellent Campaign Monitor service. He’s got almost 300 comments on his entry about this cockup:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/01/microsoft_takes_email_design_b.html#comments
I commented there and linked to this entry. Hopefully some of those angry people will help you out.
January 18th, 2007 at 3:06 am
Oops, forgot to reload the page before commenting. But I will jump in and say that I would never use HTML email but that I send out newsletters for my company that absolutely benefit from HTML. This is a huge step backwards for people trying to create attractive and well-coded HTML newsletters.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:52 am
That’s awesome news Molly, great to hear Microsoft is prepared to listen and thanks so much for doing all the hard work in the middle. At minimum, we think they should offer stable support for the following:
* background-image
* clear
* float
* position
* the alt attribute
* better box model support
We’re currently doing some serious testing with Windows Live Mail too (the next version of Hotmail getting rolled out this year). We’ll have some additional suggestions ready once that’s completed which I can post here in a few days. Thanks again for any help you can offer passing this on to the Office team.
January 18th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Molly
There is a simple answer to all of this. I would have thought that you apparently being a Little Britain fan would have already thought of this. On receipt of an HTML email, all email clients should show up the message……….. “THE COMPUTER SAYS NO”. The people wanting to send HTML emails will soon desist and Microsoft will have to unwind their horrible HTML rendering from the outlook product, helping slim down the Office suite helping to prevent further application bloat. I can only wish :0)
January 18th, 2007 at 10:37 am
No floats and no background images are the two biggest problems with the Word rendering engine in my opinion. As somebody who makes a living (at least in part) by creating XHTML email newsletters, this is bad news indeed. I won’t be drying my tears any time soon.
January 18th, 2007 at 10:46 am
I am indirectly effected as have developed a direct marketing software system for clients which will be an issue on this. I am having to school these clients while soothing various panic button booboos that they appear to have from hitting themsselves with said panic button. It’s hard to get the bath water and baby not to be chucked out with the pram toys. I’m gathering more information to be educated about my response of booboo kissing.
January 18th, 2007 at 11:00 am
Here is one article i found that details some of the basics that will not work anymore in Outlook 2007, when rendering HTML E-Mails:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/01/10/microsoft-breaks-html-email-rendering-in-outlook/
Though this looks bad, there is maybe also some good. This bascically means, that we are back to total basics concerning HTML Newsletters, with simple structures, few images and more content.
First it seems like one of the usual MS thoughts gone bad, but i am wondering what turns this will take. Not like its just a few small people using Microsoft Office.
January 18th, 2007 at 11:01 am
thanks for the article. I now understand a bit of the reasons why Microsoft wants to use the render engine, but mainly the background image issue worries me as a designer: Outlook 2007 does not render background images in inline styles nor as bgimage in a table(-cell).
I wonder what reason Microsoft has. Readability?
January 18th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
[…] Molly Holzschlag, What Really Happened with HTML and CSS in Outlook 2007 […]
January 18th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
I’m a bit new to web design, this being my first year ‘n’ all. But how comes MS used the Word engine, what is wrong with the front page engine?
Don’t get me wrong i dunt trust front page either, but it would’ve been better than word.
Or not.
And Why not leave worrying about being a web designer to us, and not the user who will send a letter to thier mother using word to make it look pretty. In that case Microsoft with thier infintie wisdom shoulda made it auto attach cos wots the garuntee that at the other end the user is using outlook.
Microsoft, inconsiderate mastorbateors.
January 18th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Wow, could you have possibly written this in a more insulting manner?
“Kicking and screaming”? “magic kisses”?
As insulting as you seem, you are right. There’s really nothing that can be done but suck it up and deal with it. But this is seriously going to affect real people with real jobs and their real lives.
I’m terribly glad that I don’t have to write html email templates at part of my job anymore, whew.
Thanks Microsoft, yet another _wonderful_ rendering engine, yay!
Welcome to 1996.
January 18th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Molly wrote: “and plan how we’re going to fix this”. Don’t you mean how Microsoft are gonna fix this?
Anyway, it’ll be years before the majority of users are on Outlook 2007.
January 18th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
It’s not meant as insulting, merely to point out . . . . whining does NOTHING. We have to take control of this. Do people here really think Microsoft or anyone is going to do what we want them to without us making noise? Honestly, is there any hard working developer here who thinks for a moment that anything will ever get done without our fixing it? If so, we ought to meet for a cup of coffee and have a nice chat.
January 18th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Why aren’t they changing the composing engine to IE, instead of the other way around? It’s not like IE doesn’t support WYSIWYG-style editing. For smart quotes and auto-correction features? I’d rather see that implemented in IE, rather than swapping IE for Word, or IE implemented in Word.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I loath Word’s auto-correction features, and disable all of them promptly when sitting down to a new Word install.
I’d rather have IE compose messages with less glitz and glamor, than Word do it with less standards support.
On the other side, does Entourage 2004 use Word 2004 to render HTML when viewing messages on the Mac side? It definitely seems to do things all its own.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
This raises the question of what happens if one has Outlook but not Word. My Windows laptop (which admittedly I hardly use since Parallels came out) has a copy of Outlook installed as part of the supporting software for my iPaq PDA, so it’s certainly possible to have Outlook without installing the full Office suite. Would a standalone Outlook be left unable to handle HTML email (admittedly a win in my book) or would it install a whole bunch of Word DLLs, in the Microsoft tradition of causing application bloat?
January 18th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Great. I have now been forewarned. I certainly want to implement CSS2 into all of my XHTML web layouts in the future. But, here is a case where reverting back to that rock solid old school table method will do the trick. It’s a good excuse to dive back into my old favorite - Fireworks - and be really fast.
I could care less how my web site looks like on their tool. But, for corporate emails, at least we can all say we know the routine on how to develop these old school layouts. It’s like riding a bicycle. Once you learn you never forget.
January 18th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
[…] Was ist passiert? Molly Holzschlag berichtet: What Really Happened with HTML and CSS in Outlook 2007. Wie kann es sein, dass Outlook auf den Stand des letzten Jahrhunderts zurückfällt und was bedeutet das für Entwickler? Mehr dazu im Blog von Campaignmonitor: Microsoft takes email design back 5 years […]
January 18th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
“merely to point out . . . . whining does NOTHING” - oh, the irony.
January 18th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
[…] Was ist passiert? Molly Holzschlag berichtet: What Really Happened with HTML and CSS in Outlook 2007. Wie kann es sein, dass Outlook auf den Stand des letzten Jahrhunderts zurückfällt und was bedeutet das für Entwickler? Mehr dazu im Blog von Campaignmonitor: Microsoft takes email design back 5 years. […]
January 18th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Outlook 2007 - schade - das war’s dann wieder mit schönen Mails…
Gerade fand ich bei Vorsprung durch Webstandards einen Beitrag, der nachhaltig für ein beschissenes Gefühl in meiner Magengegend sorgt.Erst vor ca. einem halben Jahr habe ich dank David Greiners Artikel: "HTML Emails - Taming the Beast" angefa
January 18th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
[…] Molly Holzschlag, ehemals Kopf der Microsoft-Taskforce des Webstandards Project, geht dagegen sehr pragmatisch an die Sache ran, hat sich bereits mit Microsoft in Verbindung gesetzt und fordert in ihrem Blog dazu auf, eine Liste mit allen Wünschen der Webdesigner zusammenzustellen. Irgendwie verstehe ich nur den Sinn dahinter nicht so richtig. Es ist doch offensichtlich, dass wir – egal ob Browser oder Mailclient – einfach nur die aktuellen Spezifikationen möglichst vollständig in jegliche Anzeigesoftware für selbige implementiert haben wollen. Was soll da dieses Kindergarten-Theater mit Vorschlägen an Microsoft? Die sind doch selbst Mitglied der Organisation, welche die “Empfehlungen” formuliert hat. Und wenn sie unbedingt hundertprozentige Kompatibilität mit dem Editor zum Verfassen der e-Mails haben wollen, dann sollen sie halt diesen anpassen und nicht umgekehrt. […]
January 18th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
CSS things like floating, margins, paddings. these things do not work 100% in some webmailclients too, That outlook doesn’t support that anymore does not shock me as an e-maildesigner. You can work around that with good old stable tables, whitespaces with transparent pixel.gif’s, etc. etc. But the background-image behind a text…. not to talk about animated gifs…
January 18th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
So? Have Microsoft they plan to change this situation? Do they recognise how wrong they are? Or do they think this is just fine as it is? They couldn’t use MS expression engine to make html emails?
January 18th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Well, this leaves me just about as chagrinned as I am looking at the MS site links you posted in the article: they break horrendously in Firefox 2/Mac. They don’t break in Safari, though: the left nav panel just fails to load. So this is the future of HTML email? Somehow, I don’t think MS is getting too much right these days…
January 19th, 2007 at 12:23 am
Having been beta-testing Outlook 2007 on Windows Vista for the last 3 months, I can assure you that this problem practically eliminates the possibility of using CSS for positioning and layout. I’d feel much more comfortable if (like AOL, Hotmail and Gmail) the CSS was simply ignored, as I’ve become accustomed to designing my CSS-based eNewsletters to be read comfortably when viewed “style-lessly”.
For the short term, I’d be happy to find a hack/filter that would effectively hide the CSS styles from Outlook 2007 altogether. Until Outlook 2007 adoption reaches a critical mass, this would provide a great stop-gap and would mean that I don’t have to go back to using tables (ugh!), spacer gifs and putting the template “graphics” in the HTML rather than the CSS.
If anyone knows a way to hide all styles from OL 2007, please post!
January 19th, 2007 at 2:43 am
Well, I’m knee-deep into this today as I working on a Mailbuild template that I am trying to future-proof and many of the problems that I am running into are not just designing around the new Word ‘07 html rendering, but also problems with things that are not quite documented.
One of my biggest peeves:
On P and DIV tags, we cannot use BORDER, PADDING or WIDTH. However, MARGIN does work. On the flip side, Hotmail as well as the new Windows Live Mail beta completely ignores MARGIN and instead allows for the PADDING. So, this leaves my emails not looking as intended in only one of two Microsoft products.
Also, I I’m finding it hard to not be able to fine-tune my paddings/margin. I especially miss resetting them to zero.
Also, since FLOAT is out, I have to use the ALIGN tribute for my images again. On an image that I have aligned to the right or left, I can’t add a border, margin OR padding. (For example, if I only want a padding on the bottom-left or bottom-right.)
The worst part about not being able to use CSS for xhtml emails like I used to, is that I can no longer “build to break” my design. Previously, I could control my design enough that if someone *didn’t* have the support the needed, I could be assured that the email would degrade gracefully enough. Now, that is no longer the case. This makes for a difficult situation.
Fixes that I need to use to ensure that my email is presented decently in Outlook are breaking my emails in other clients that normally are rock solid. Hell, I previously never worried too much about Outlook because things actually “worked” in it before.
Obviously, over time I’ll learn to deal with some of these quarks and design around them. At the moment, due to a deadline, I don’t really have the luxury.
Finally, I’m quite surprised how much I forgot about table-based design!
January 19th, 2007 at 2:56 am
Oh, I should also add I’m getting some very strange formatting with any lists (specifically an unordered list I am using now.)
January 19th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Molly wrote: “Honestly, is there any hard working developer here who thinks for a moment that anything will ever get done without our fixing it?”
Surely this is not the way a proper business should work? Microsoft should be fully aware of standards and be progressing CSS and HTML support without the need for designers to shout about what doesn’t work. Sure, we may suggest improvements, or extra features, or report bugs, but the core of the program should have excellent support for current internet markup and style languages without our help.
January 19th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Molly, first of all thank you for being positive about this and pointing out that if we want change, we have to talk constructively to the people who can make that change happen instead of whining to ourselves and each other. Always a valuable reminder
As far as what needs to be fixed in Outlook’s HTML rendering, I don’t think there’s anyone who understands HTML email better than the Campaign Monitor guys, so whatever Dave Greiner says, everyone should listen to
January 19th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
If you’re going to claim to be able to send and receive HTML email, then it might be nice if you support HTML properly.
If they want suggestions of what I think it should and shouldn’t support, I think the HTML support should be at least as good as IE7’s.
January 19th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
:) Yet another list of reasons not to use Microsoft products.
And as a developer I couldn’t care less about what MS does I just disregard it and grin when users ask why it looks awful, I just tell them it’s their (MS) software’s fault, thus contributing to motivate more people to stop using that junk.
Fortunately the guys at MS are always helping to the demise of their company.
January 19th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Since I detest HTML e-mail like the white plague, I couldn’t really care less which HTML rendering engines any company would use in either composition or rendering of such messages. I convert everything to plain text anyhow, which Outlook actually is rather good at.
However, I do understand that this cuases difficulties for a large range of people and it’s a rather insane decision to make. I understand that Word offers some invaluable functionality to Outlook e-mail composition to people who have become addicted to it, but still.
January 19th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
We use HTML for internal corporate emails - we need the flexibility that background images and colors provide. We still code in tables to be safe but use inline styling for things such as marinn, padding, font related things, and colors/bg. Removing essentials such as a background… I just don’t know how we’re going to handle this. We always provide a web address for those that don’t render the email but it’s an email… users shouldn’t have to leave the screen.
January 20th, 2007 at 2:20 am
[…] Another Microsoft debacle - I wonder if they’ll call it an enhancement? […]
January 20th, 2007 at 2:36 am
Well if you think this news is bad, download the trial versions of Office 2007. Thats really nasty. Ooops guess what Outlook 2007 is disabled in the trial…
it will be interesting to see how compatible the email is since the Word and PPT files need a converter sent to the recipients to be able to open those respective documents.
January 20th, 2007 at 9:15 am
If anything should be done to go to Microsoft and tell them we want things changed, I guess the webstandards microsoft task force should collect some HTML e-mail newsletters from big corporations, make an appointment with the marketing managers and CIO’s of those corporations and show them what happens to their newsletter from the current version of Outlook to the new version of Outlook.
I guess the big corporations have a bit more leverage in telling Microsoft they are not so pleased and how Microsoft thinks they will reimburse the big corporations to put out a lot of money to fix things the corporations should not have fixed in the first place, because they thought that Microsoft was a reliable business partner.
If WASP works with the developers within Microsoft, the leverage to really get time and money allocated within Microsoft to put things right quickly could be forced by the pressure of big Microsoft clients.
January 20th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
[…] Posted by Greg Shin on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 오늘 좀 쇼킹한 뉴스를 접하게 되었다. 새로 출시되는 마이크로소프트 아웃룩(Microsoft Outlook) 2007 버전에서 인터넷 익스플로러(Internet Explorer)를 HTML 렌더링 엔진으로 쓰지 않고, 대신 워드(Word) 2007을 사용한다고 한다. 몰리(Molly)에 따르면, HTML 형식의 이메일을 작성할 때와 읽을 때 같은 엔진을 사용함으로써 사용자들에게 일관성을 주려는 목적으로 그런 짓을 한 것 같다. 당연히 예상되었겠지만 워드 2007의 렌더링 엔진은 매우 조악하다고 한다. 특히나 CSS의 float를 지원하지 않는다고 하니, CSS 포지셔닝 기능을 이용해 HTML 형식의 이메일을 보내던 많은 기업 이메일 발송자들에게는 치명적인 문제가 생길 것 같다. 사이트 포인트에서도 이 문제에 대해 시끄럽고, 캠페인 모니터 블로그에서는 마이크로소프트가 이메일 디자인을 5년은 후퇴시켰다고 비난하고 있다. […]
January 20th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Can it be, that this is actually a step in the right direction?
Look, now we can argue about backward-compatibility because this breaks much more than IE6 to IE7 did.
Also IE is released from it’s bound to Office, so probably backward-compatibility will become a less important factor for the work on IE.
Or am I just thinking in the wrong direction?
January 21st, 2007 at 12:24 pm
This is typical Microsoft BS. Are we supposed to act all grateful because they *might* try and fix some problems with Outlook 2007 which should never have been there in the first place if they’d have tested the damn thing properly? Be careful not to lose your objectivity Molly, taking the Microsoft shilling has a habit of doing that to people!
January 22nd, 2007 at 2:55 am
Molly, to get the ball rolling, here are 3 sample CSS based HTML emails that look fine in Outlook 2000/2003 but break in 2007. There are plenty more where these came from, so let me know if any more specific types of examples will help.
Digital Web Magazine
Outlook 2000 vs Outlook 2007
Tucson Downtown Alliance
Outlook 2000 vs Outlook 2007
Walking on Water
Outlook 2000 vs Outlook 2007
January 22nd, 2007 at 3:21 am
My greatest concern here is the end-user. Our emails ran into rendering problem with certain Lotus users. They really wanted our content, so I heard from some that stayed subscribed in the hopes we’d fix it. I had one gentleman end user gracious enough to entertain a dialogue as I tried to repair our newsletters so that they looked accurate in his client.
Ultimately I was only able to achieve half-success, but I learned very well how frustrating it was that Lotus and his content would not work together. Fault aside, he wasn’t happy with anyone and that costs every party involved.
From the send side, I have reservations about this change which are obvious by now. (Though coding for tables is not the end of the world…)
But from MS’ side, this is baffling, because the worst possible experience for new Outlook users will be if content they actually enjoy reading, or need to receive fails to work because of an ‘enhanced’ feature. I can’t think of much that will incline people to roll back to a previous version, or try a competitor more than this. Perhaps someone will be ok with a mis-rendered EW.com email, but what about their automatically generated bills, etc?
This seems like a potential black eye for MS.
January 22nd, 2007 at 9:11 am
Hi,
I’ve recently run a campaign and I am lucky enough to know someone with a copy of Outlook 2007 on their works machine. Here is a html file containing the email - http://www.newace.co.uk/email.asp and here is a screen grab of the email in Outlook 2007 - http://www.newace.co.uk/swift-email.jpg
A lot of the elements are positioned so this is why things are all over the place. For me the most important thing is that the content is still readable, and people can always click on the problem viewing link.
Molly on the CampaignBlog article it mentions you will be able to show this kind of thing to MS to help them understand the problems with the Word rendering engine….I hope this helps.
January 22nd, 2007 at 10:18 am
Ok, I’m still not over this and still think Microsoft is doing a great job making an utter fool of itself every day again. But let’s be constructive here.
First off, I don’t have any MS web software or Dreamweaver at all so their software validator leaves me empty-handed. And I don’t feel like paying right away for a service like sitevista.com. Ergo, I don’t have any way of testing our company’s e-mails.
I have been through loopholes and endlessly going back and forth between all sorts of (online) e-mails clients, to finally come to a horribly 1999-kinda html e-mail template, but it works.
At least, until Outlook 07, because as far as I can tell now, it will be severely broken.
We’re 2007 now, and web standards have been around long enough now to righteously claim from MS: proper background images and colors (css and html), solid css positioning and a box model that works. Please.
January 22nd, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Here’s an idea. What if messages composed in Outlook using the Word component were sent with a header indicating “MS Office mode”? Then Outlook could use the Word renderer for those, and Trident for everything else. Other clients might devise workarounds for messages with this header, perhaps failing back to plaintext.
This would let Microsoft and Office users do whatever they like in their backyard, without affecting anyone else.
Seriously. This meets the Microsoft goals that Molly has relayed above. If Microsoft is unwilling to identify Outlook 2007-generated HTML format messages as a kind of exception, I’ll have to assume it has additional, unstated goals. Ahem.
LQ
January 24th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
What about Outlook Express? Most People have it installed when buying a new pc.
Is Outlook Express auto updated? Is it using Word as a renderng engine?
Thanks in advance
RH
January 25th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
and i thought microsoft might have learned something over the last decade
somebody put a stop this madness!
January 25th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
What happened to the ‘Report Rendering Problem’ button in the Outlook 2007 B2TR? Can this be put back somehow? Perhaps if MS started getting examples of the problems with rendering they’d at least realize there *is* a problem.
January 26th, 2007 at 1:17 am
Is Microsoft really this brain-dead? Or are they just so used to doing things the MS way, that they can’t see the huge number of viable alternatives that exist?
How about a win-win solution? Every Outlook email sent contains a header similar to this:
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)
Why can’t Outlook check for this? If it exists, use the Outlook viewer; otherwise, use the IE viewer.
Maybe this is too simple for Microsoft to understand.
January 26th, 2007 at 4:58 am
Molly says: “HMTL and CSS standards”
January 26th, 2007 at 5:00 am
Here’s a tip for Microsoft: I want you to take my money.
I’m a relative n00b in the whole web publishing business with only a few years of self-taught stuff in my free time. I’ve been looking to upgrade to Outlook for a) an email client so I can avoid having to use free clients like Gmail/Hotmail/YahooMail etc. and b) so that I can use it as a PIM.
At this point, Microsoft will get zero dollars from me until Outlook supports CSS which I’ve spent the better part of 100 hours teaching myself to use. It’s good. It’s STANDARD, by all means Microsoft, please support it.
I’m one person, but there are several people that I know that make their buying decisions based on my recommendations. Granted, 10 or 20 people not buying Outlook won’t cause the behemoth to blink an eye, and yet I’m certain that there are countless others like me who won’t bother to say a word.
Microsoft - please support standards. I’ll pay to use your stuff if it’s good, instead of using the free stuff that I do now.
January 26th, 2007 at 10:25 am
It’s great that MS are going to listen to people’s comments but it seems a little bit late does it not? As it’s probably to late in development to make wholesale changes.
For what it’s worth on a personal level I’m not to fussed about HTML newsletters, I don’t tend to buy products and services because of them. However, from experience (and stats to prove it) they work seriously well for my customers and in the long run it is they not me who will suffer. In years gone by when there were badly design sites, malfunctioning flash sites that had to be on a PC with IE version 5.1.1.2.2.2.2 (you get the picture?) we could blame technology and customers would believe it because the internet was some new fangled thing, a black art if you will. Those kind of excuses were crap then and we won’t stand for them today, so why should we have to put up with this from Microsoft?
The solution would seem to be; 1.harangue MS into realising the error of there ways. 2. Openly chastise the new version of Office to put people off. 3. Promote better software and web applications as an alternative; I’m thinking OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Google Calendar etc
I for one have all but ditched using Office; I think this will be the final nail in the coffin.
January 26th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Phew, that was close! I have recently been doing some CSS based email newsletters for a client and I was getting quite good at doing them table free using CSS (If you embed the CSS correctly they even look great in Hotmail, Outlook and Gmail). I was even thinking that this would be the direction my business would go in.
Thank you Microsoft for taking the decision out of my hands. No more lucrative newsletters for me! I’m moving back to web design.
Here’s hoping that IE8 will remove CSS compatibility too so I can give up my job completely and live on the streets!
January 26th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Ok Molly, here’s my list:
1) Create an XML preprocessor tag at the beginning of rich e-mails that defines the DOCTYPE. Let this DOCTYPE be either some XML-like format (such as HTML4.x, XHTML, XML with CSS, etc…), or Microsoft Word format.
That’s IT!
Microsoft better do it, or I’ll just never jump into the world of HTML e-mails. This is the reason why I haven’t already. Accessibility and interoperability are just nil.
January 27th, 2007 at 2:50 am
[…] You can read her post, What Really Happened with HTML and CSS in Outlook 2007, on her website and get all the details. It still doesn’t make sense to me though on their reasons for the change. […]
January 27th, 2007 at 2:53 am
Thanks for taking the initiative to investigate and write this follow-up article on the changes that have occurred and why they happened. Although I haven’t researched this problem in much detail, I know my readers have been very interested in the developments. Your post and the follow-up comments and have been very helpful. Thanks again.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
[…] According to the article the purpose was because the Word HTML engine is used for composing e-mails and has inconsistencies with Explorer for rendering them. If this really is such an issue, why not standardize Word to use Explorer as the rendering engine. I thought that was the purpose of bundling the browser with the operating system, Microsoft? […]
January 29th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
Surely I’m not the only LiveJournal user out there on Office 2007, though there may not be too many of us just yet until people buy it bundled on new PC’s. This cripples LiveJournal post/comment notification e-mails. They’re not unreadable, but it slows me down big time as my eyes have to dig through the e-mail for the part I care about. Plus, the embedded HTML form for replying is gone, which I don’t miss at all but MANY people will, until they move to GMail, of course…
I’ve worked with Microsoft teams in my capacity as an MVP and ASPInsider long enough to know they thought of some of the obvious (and abusively-stated) suggestions above and must have reasons for doing it this way. However, I’ve also worked with them long enough to know that they can screw up major decisions like this as badly as anyone, but fortunately they do seem to listen and get it right eventually. C’mon, Microsoft, let’s see a big service pack soon to address this!
January 29th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
[…] Molly Holzschlag’s (molly.com) post on the subject says that the impetus for this change was the unacceptable differences that MS Outlook users were seeing between what they saw in their inbox (rendered by IE engine) and what their friends saw when they forwarded those messages on to them (Composed by Word engine). Or when they composed messages from scratch (Word in Outlook) and their friends tried to read them (IE engine again). So it makes sense that you’d want the same engine to create a message that you use to view it. But Word? Really? […]
January 30th, 2007 at 3:59 am
This rendering code is also killing outlook’s performance and system stability. on outlook 2003, I frequently had to switch the editor from Word to the built-in Outlook editor… We’re no longer given that choice.
January 31st, 2007 at 6:24 pm
I just started an online petition to gather the opinions of kindred spirits on this subject. I’m aiming for about 500.000 signatures, to be offered to mister Gates personally. By HTML-rich e-mail, obviously
Please join the petition:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Decent_HTML_in_Outlook_2007/
January 31st, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Why not just have Word create HTML that renders correctly?
January 31st, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Good CSS Support is critical. The browser engine had it, the word engine doesn’t. This has to be fixed.
February 1st, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Well thats it! Could someone talk to Adobe regarding a pdf email rendering machine for all email clients. I’m ready to switch. That would stop MS from making too many decisions for us.
February 1st, 2007 at 10:09 pm
I just installed Office 2007 and have tested my current HTML templates. Outlook has gone from being one of the better HTML email clients, to one of the worst, on par with gmail or Hotmail. Not only are backgrounds not rendered and floats are ignored, but basic css properties such as padding are displayed incorrectly. This is an incredibly arrogant and ill advised move, especially after the overtures that were made to work with the web standards community over the IE 7 release.
Now HTML email developers will need to create a whole new set of kludges to work with Outlook 2007. We can only hope that pressure from the community will ultimately lead MS to fix this great leap backward.
February 2nd, 2007 at 12:23 am
My 2 cents… if MS is truly standardising their systems then great. It’ll make it much easier in the future but… for now it just makes another compatibility headache for all the designers out there who want to make material that’s universally compatible. The real difficulty comes with the NEXT release after this, where they decide that a totally new engine is appropriate to deal with… say… email video, or live audio streaming because they want to compete with yahoo, and then we’ll just have another set of constraints to work around, all of which restricts the flow of rich media through email. Where’s the vision? direction? preplanning?
Great marketing, but what about the actual product?
Sure it’s evolving, but it’s a messy path to go down.
February 2nd, 2007 at 4:38 pm
[…] What Really Happened with HTML and CSS in Outlook 2007 […]
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:24 pm
There are a number of email publishers who use animated .gifs as part of their advertising options. Many valuable email newsletters are ad-supported.
This is quite a step backward for email, Microsoft, and their users.
As for those who desire a world of text-only emails, I encourage them to keep up their crusade and expand it; maybe we can have a text-only web in a few years. After that, they should appeal for monitors which only display binary.
February 5th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Well that’s us out - we won’t be upgrading to Office 2007
docs.google.com + gmail suddenly looking really tempting!
PLEASE just fix it. As many have said before not being CSS compliant is just plain wrong and should not need anyone telling MS.
Tom.
February 6th, 2007 at 11:08 am
The ALT Tag is a must in my opinion. Accessability should be a major issue in Outlook 2007.
February 7th, 2007 at 10:22 am
The biggest problem I have with the new rendering engine is that replies written in thunderbird with teh comments inlined in the original message become hard to read. In Thunderbird the quoted text si clearly marked with a blue bar and this used to be rendered correctly by Outlook. But now the indentation and coloured bars are gone which makes it hard to differentiate between the original message and the inlined comments.
February 8th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
I’m still in denial. Please Microsoft fix this before I have to come out of it. And here I was hoping I could change my hyperlink colors in html email.
February 10th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
The following CSS based newsletters no longer render correctly in Outlook 2007.
http://cbr.co.za/newsletter/default.aspx
http://dataweek.co.za/newsletter/default.aspx
http://instrumentation.co.za/newsletter/default.aspx
http://motioncontrol.co.za/newsletter/default.aspx
http://networktimes.co.za/newsletter/default.aspx
http://securitysa.com/newsletter/default.aspx
We have worked hard at getting these compliant, platform and browser independent.
In one ‘fell-swoop’ Microsoft has torpedoed ALL of that hard work.
Yes, we will fix the problems … but if I had a $ for every hour that Microsoft has wasted of my time, I would be wealthier than Bill himself.
February 15th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
I think this is an odd move. We’ve been preaching for years for everyone to move into a standards-compliant web world, but this takes away a lot of the practices that are now common. What perplexes me the most is no support for background images? No animated gifs?
Why does M$ talk about how forward progressing IE7 is, and then turn the knob back on html email? I haven’t made a table-based layout in a long time, and I’m thinking that I have to go back to that now.
Sigh.
February 17th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
It’s been a month and I’m really interested in what Microsoft has to say about this, officially.
We’ve had to convert all of our customer communication emails back to the classic days of table layout, which I think is a disgusting mess.
Sincerely,
Vito DeCarlo
The Pulse Internet Services, Inc.
www.thepulse.net
February 19th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Here’s a newsletter template from my biggest/best email client that now gets a bit garbled in Outlook 2007. We’re mostly talking about background images, plus floats and clears.
http://orangegrovemedia.cmail1.com/campaign/campaignPreview.aspx?cID=JzUL%2bxgn168%3d&f=t/
Thanks Molly!
February 22nd, 2007 at 8:08 am
I am not so sure that the problems with Outlook 2007 are that significant.
The problem is in delivery. E-mail is not a replacement or substitute for better forms of communication. Too many newsletters attempt to duplicate, for example, complex Web content.
RSS feeds have become a better method for delivering technical data, etc, that is constantly evolving.
E-mail should be simple in design, direct and succinct. Readers can be easily directed to additional content via links.
When images are used within e-Mail, and such has value, descriptive text adjacent to the image is more practical than an ALT tag requirement.
E-mail should be nothing more than a simple notification of availability of pertinant information that can be delivered via video feeds, compliant HTML Web content, Adobe PDF, WPF/E .. whatever meets the requirement.
A straigtforward table design can meet the requirement of effective simplicity for e-Mail. God did say, “Let there be Dreamweaver” for a reason.
As designers, we should remember that more is not often better, particularly when it comes to e-Mail communication?
Albeit, it would be nice if standards were met across the board in all tools available for the development of Internet communication. However when that happens, my Outlook 2008 will be filling up with overly designed, hard to read, non-linear, bulky, confusing e-Mail based Web content.
By the way, Al Gore knew better than to try to lay claim to inventing e-Mail. He knew that if he did, someone would beat the hell out of him.
February 24th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
After FoWA London 2007
Heathrow Airport, gate 19, waiting to board the plane back to Geneva with Mathias and Enrique. The Future of Web Apps 2007 conference wrapped up yesterday for us as we didn’t attend today’s workshops. I’m flying back with mixed…
February 26th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
[…] It is no secret now that Microsoft has decided to switch Outlook 2007 from IE rendering html e-mails to Word rendering html e-mails (http://www.molly.com/2007/01/18/what-happened-with-html-and-css-in-outlook-2007/). This decision already spells disaster for those who rely on html e-mails to get information from point A to point B. HTML e-mails do not automatically mean spam, they are also used to transport reports within companies to a distribution list. […]
February 27th, 2007 at 3:28 am
Thunderbird FTW!!
seriously though, who cares? no one reads your bullshit newsletters and those that do couldn’t tell a good design from a bad one if they had both sitting in front of them and one was labelled ‘good design’ and one was labelled ‘bad design’.
just keep doing html email as you always have, and include a link up the top that says “click this if you are unfortunate enough to be using microsoft outlook and want to see this page displayed properly”
February 27th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
This problem clearly effects many more people than just email marketers. As an application developer this is going to throw a monkey wrench into all of the applications I have written. I heavily rely on html emails to brand simple confimation messages, etc. So, moving forward, what reason could microsoft possibly give to not just say screw it an let them read the text version? Maybe add a line (taken from the good old fashioned ie sites) like this email is best viewed on any email client other than outlook ‘07!
February 27th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
As a designer and programmer, this type of news is really upsetting. I was hopeful that Microsoft was coming to their senses with IE7, but forcing their own proprietary format on emails is such a huge step backwards and only reveals their own short-sightedness on matters of accessibility and standards.
Is there anyway we can make our voices heard by the good folks at Microsoft? There must be someway we can prevent them from making this terrible mistake.
February 28th, 2007 at 2:10 am
Glad to see you’re promising to get issues before the right people. You know, IBM has a formal mechanism with the user group SHARE (which isn’t an acronym). Within SHARE there are “projects” which correlate more or less with large swaths of IBM software (DB2 project for example encompasses the relational database manager and all associated tools). The projects write up (with business reasons, impact, etc.) and prioritize by voting their “requirements” which are then passed through IBM. IBM makes a formal response to each one at a future SHARE meeting (usually but not always the next one). Those which reach ‘accepted’ status make it into the product. This is not for bug fixes, but for product enhancement - does Microsoft have a similar mechanism? If not, it might be a good way to get a handle on what the most important development issues should be.
March 6th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
I have only just read this. It sucks. I have just changed jobs from a company that has always refused to use CSS in newsletters and made me work on table-based only to one that encourages standard compliancy, and now this. In the words of the late great Winston Churchill : “well bugger that for a lark, I’m off to the pub !”
He really did say that, just no-one else was listening at the time.
March 14th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
I find it interesting that the ’standards community’ seems to be ignoring the fact that the standard for email is plain text, also known as ‘ASCII’ text which stands for ‘American Standard Code for Information Interchange’. Plain text will render properly across all email clients and has many other benefits over HTML email such as size, speed, and security.
CSS doesn’t belong in email. If you’re emailing people web pages, you need to rethink what you’re doing. That’s just one man’s opinion, feel free to disagree.
March 14th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
This e-mail when sent to people with Outlook 2007 does not let them download images. They can see it in the preview pane but not in the actual e-mail
http://tools.netgear.com/emails/2007/GSSS/email_Enduser.html
Sakshi Goel
eMarketing Manager
NETGEAR Inc.
March 18th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Why should I bother with this system? I see no compelling reason to go through the hassle. MS rushed this product to market and it;s not ready.
April 5th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
this is really a pain, very disgusting, me as a designer get me to 5 years ago.
No background images - Background images in divs and table cells are gone, meaning Mark’s image replacement technique is out the window.
Poor background color support - Give a div or table cell a background color, add some text to it and the background color displays fine. Nest another table or div inside though and the background color vanishes.
No support for float or position - Completely breaking any CSS based layouts right from the word go. Tables only.
Shocking box model support - Very poor support for padding and margin, and you thought IE5 was bad!
Microsoft have released a full run down of what is and isn’t supported, including a downloadable validator that helps you validate your HTML for their engine. Word of warning though, it only works with Microsoft software and Dreamweaver, and it even help.
It is so far of the new technology and design era
April 9th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
This is so frustrating! Everyone sends emails with images. Now I can’t see them! The logic behind this doesn’t jive with reality. Why make things harder for the end user?
April 11th, 2007 at 7:35 am
[…] Ich habe mich gefragt, warum Microsoft zu einer so unpopulären Massnahme greift. Aus Redmond direkt konnte ich nichts finden. Hingegen hat die bekannte Usability-Expertin Molly Holzschlag offenbar Insider-Informationen 2). Bisher brauchte Outlook zwei verschiedene Rendering Engines – die Engine von IE zum Ansehen und diejenige von Word zum Schreiben. Das hatte den unschönen Effekt, dass ein erhaltenes Mail nach dem Editieren und Forwarden ganz anders aussah als bei Erhalt. […]
April 15th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Almost every HTML email I send has a background image down each side - there’s no other good way to allow the email to be whatever length you want it to be. It’s just the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. There are too many rules now - it’s spoiling the whole concept of HTML emails.
Both of these are screwed up on the new Outlook:
http://www.anythingarts.com/archives/archives-2007/email-2007Mar22.html
http://www.thisweekinsarasota.com/email.php
April 15th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
One thing I just thought of and didn’t see it here is the notion of saving bandwidth. Isn’t that one of the bigger pluses of using CSS? Even Doug Bowman did a huge example by re-coding Microsoft’s front page back in 2004 and how much bandwidth could be saved by using leaner code.
April 15th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
E grande io ha trovato il vostro luogo! Le info importanti ottenute! ))
April 18th, 2007 at 12:29 am
I didn’t believe it at first when I heard that the IE engine wouldn’t be used in Outlook 2007, but after using Outlook 2007 now for a few months I have found this a major annoyance. Almost every HTML email that I receive has a visual rendering flaw.
I really hope that in SP1, Microsoft at least decides to make an advanced option that allows users to enable the IE engine on their own terms.
April 18th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
test
April 19th, 2007 at 4:24 am
Okay, here’s the deal and this is how it works across ALL platforms and web clients:
Dave Greiner from CampaignMonitor requested support for the following:
* background-image
* clear
* float
* position
* the alt attribute
* better box model support
I would love it if they were all supported, but they are not, so I can agree on only 1 of those listed, which I found necessary: alt=”attribute”. It has been known for years that bg-images, float, clear, box model and positioning have no place in HTML e-mails. Use them online for sure, but when talking HTML e-mails YOU SHOULD ALWAYS STICK TO INLINCE CSS AND TALBE-BASED DESIGN! In other words forget about trying to force nice web 2.0 like web standards onto HTML e-mails…you’ll fail at some point in some e-mail client. Use inline CSS/table-based design and build reasonable e-mails and your e-mails will look just fine.
For detailed explanation and examples, I’ll try to post a few examples for download at my website: www.playgrounds.dk
P.s. Thank you Molly for a great show in Boston (AEA)
The Great Dane
April 19th, 2007 at 11:00 am
I can understand the motivation for this, but what if 2 rendering engines were used? Put a special tag into mails that are composed with Outlook to say they should be rendered with the Word engine, and anything else should not.
April 20th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
i am disapointed please use standard CSS HTML thats all we need a standard.
April 21st, 2007 at 4:46 am
According to this quote taken from http://www.emaillabs.com/tools/email-marketing-statistics.html
“HTML has nearly universal adoption among consumers: A Jupiter Research consumer survey found just 3% receive only text email.”
For Microsoft to ignore this and ignore the wishes of those working in the email marketing business is just totally insane.
Molly, yourself, and other advocates of text email are a very small minority of email users, are you saying the majority of people are wrong for wanting to accept pretty web 2.0 style emails?
This seems quite strange from some one that is such a huge advocate of CSS and standards in general.
Is it wrong to want to have a seamless experience from html email to the email campaigners website for recipients of html email?
April 24th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
[…] You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your ownsite. […]
April 24th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
[…] Microsoft hat die Outlook 2007 zugrunde liegende Rendering-Engine gewechselt: Statt den aktuellen und bei der Darstellung von Cascading Stylesheet deutlich verbesserten Internet Explorer 7 zu nutzen, setzt Outlook 2007 die Rendering-Engine von Word 2007 ein.Einen Grund nennt ein etwas älterer Artikel von Molly E. Holzschlag: Outlook hat zuvor den Internet Explorer zur Darstellung und Word zur Erstellung von HTML-E-Mails genutzt. Outlook 2007 bringt Darstellung und Erstellung der E-Mails wieder zusammen und nutzt leider den kleinsten gemeinsamen Nenner - die Rendering-Engine von Word. […]
April 25th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
[…] I know there have been several articles and posts about this subject already across the web but I have to put in my two cents worth. I agree with David Greiner at Campaign Monitor when he says “Microsoft takes email design back 5 years” with their decision to use the Word HTML rendering engine in their new Office 2007 release of Outlook. […]
April 26th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
[…] Einen Grund nennt ein etwas älterer Artikel von Molly E. Holzschlag: Outlook hat zuvor den Internet Explorer zur Darstellung und Word zur Erstellung von HTML-E-Mails genutzt. Outlook 2007 bringt Darstellung und Erstellung der E-Mails wieder zusammen und nutzt leider den kleinsten gemeinsamen Nenner - die Rendering-Engine von Word. […]
May 1st, 2007 at 7:54 am
Bin Laden should of attacked Microsoft not NYC
May 8th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Please reconsider this - not only will it be a nightmare for e-mail newsletter creators who want their newsletters to look reasonably similar in all mail clients, but as a Windows/Outlook user, I would be terribly disappointed if Outlook regressed in this way. Whatever upside there might be doesn’t come close to the downside Outlook users will suffer from this decision.
May 14th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Hi
Well, my post on my blog says it all: http://transientis.com/2007/05/outlook-2007-broken-html-rendering/ .
As, since yesterday, my site host is having some problems, here goes the problem.
Outlook 2007 does not render spans with style float:left and background-color:[color]. Incredible.
Here goes some stripped html from the view source menu:
Project Progress
/*removed…. */
Hub Edition HS_Performance progress report
Date
Resolved Effort
Open Effort
Missing Effort
Total Effort
Available Budget(26)
Expected Close Date: 2007-05-08Budget Last Date: 2007-05-18
HTML STRIPPED OUT
18.4
1
4
23.4
5
2007-05-1018.40220.46
2007-05-0917.40219.47
May 14th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
span style=’float:left;display:block;background-color:green; position:relative;left:0;width:254;top:1;height:11;z-index=1′
May 17th, 2007 at 1:49 am
Presumably this move is designed to make it easier for average joes to make fools of themselves using clipart in the emails. Sadly it makes life impossible for genuine professionals.
It is a fact that the clients for whom I put together e-newsletters insist on html with a dash of eye candy. Unless you provide reasonable support for html such newsletters will inevitably be broken for users of Office 2007.
May 17th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Has Microsoft gone MAD?
Thanks guys for making our lives a living HELL.
June 4th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Hi Jim. Photos i received. Thanks
June 5th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
I’ve only just “upgraded” to Outlook 2007, and I am distressed and furious at the impact the Word HTML engine is having on my email life.
So many of the email newsletters I subscribe to are either garbled, completely broken, or send Outlook into 100% CPU hell. Everything worked fine in Outlook 2003. MS took a very good email client and wrecked it.
Just one example:
http://www.newsparadise.com/outlook/outlook.htm
June 6th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
As a publisher of HTML e-mails, we worked extremely hard to create a cross-platform, cross-browser consistent look. The thing all major (non-Microsoft) e-mail clients have in commmon is reasonably current adherence to standards.
That is why we designed our e-mail using a xhtml 1.1 strict doctype. Now you are telling me that Outlook 2007 will only understand a subset of HTML 4.01???? This is so incredibly frustrating and backwards. IE7 and Outlook 2003 rendered the e-mail beautifully, but Outlook 2007 is for crap.
Please, please, please give us the option as to which rendering engine to use … or get rid of the inferior Word engine all together. Firefox (Thunderbird) uses a real HTML rendering engine, the same standards-compliant one for the brower. Apple Mail does the same.
Please, Microsoft. Use the engine you ALREADY have and don’t send us back to the ugly web days of the 90s.
June 6th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Here is an example of what I mean:
http://www.simmonsconsulting.com/outlook2007.html
Thanks &
Cheers,
Toby
June 8th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Dear Mr Gates
Just a little warning regards your wealth Me thinks someone is trying to take you over from within Microsoft….Me thinks they will run your business down the wrong road and strike when you are down to your last billion dollars so look out….you have been warned.
I have customers whom cannot open my attachments when I send emails with Office 2007 (Outlook 2007) I have therefore taken out 2007 and put in office 2003 back in.
(yes i know i can get converters for this and that but do i wish to tell all my customers to do this ….No i do not wish to upset them and would like to stay in business)
I had put in Vista Operating system and 80 percent of my hardware would not work (which i am not going to spend approx £8000 to put right) I have taken out vista and re -installed XP.
And what would i tell anyone whom wishes to put in Office 2007 and/or use vista ……No not worth the trouble stay with what you have and you know it works.
PS no charge for advice.
PSS excuse the rant….I am better now:)
Richard
June 11th, 2007 at 4:52 am
This is *unbelieveable*. It’s bad enough having two rendering engines on the same platform, but then *choosing* to use the worst one, for your own end and to the detriment not only of every designer out there but the progression of the technology itself, is just…well, it’s the reason so many people despise Microsoft. One step forward (finally) with IE7, six steps back with Outlook. *sigh*
June 12th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Surely if it does not support the ALT attribute there is a legal case for changing Outlook. I’m no expert here, but if this is a requirement for Web Pages, what about software?
As for the other requests, even if we don’t get the CSS support can we at least be able to put backgrounds on tables using the HTML background=”" attribute?
June 14th, 2007 at 8:45 am
I am employed to develop Marketing email for my company. Recently I have been really trying to slim down our emails by reducing the larger images to small images and then setting the size to what I needed for each cell. Outlook 07 completely destroys old HTML3.2 standards and just seems to do what it wants. If you really want to make things better tell Microsoft to support the HTML standards as set by the W3C. What is so hard about that. Every other “Good” email client leans towards this, as well as browsers.
On another note. As a developer if I make a product that my users feel doesn’t support what it should or claims to, then my users will complain to me and stp using the product, why is this not the case for MS? who cares that OutLook is used through out the business community, if it doesn’t work then don’t use it. Simple as that. Then the MS hold on the marketshare will drop and good products can finally emerge. Yes I am a MS hater, but only because of their stupid development practices, and the thinking that has developed that they are the end all of products!
So in short, tell MS to conform the W3C standards and all will be well. Also tell them to update Outlook now by rolling back to outlook 03 code, at least that supported table structure.
June 14th, 2007 at 10:13 am
Another note. How can MS tell all of us we are wrong! If things work with 99% of all other email clients, including older versions of the remaining 1% then it means MS needs to send out a patch and quickly!
June 14th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
I just wasted an hour of life at 11:00PM on a Thursday night fighting against Outlook trying to format something that will look nice. It used to work. I’d like to find the moron that made this decision and have them format my email for me. I thought new versions were supposed to be better. When did that change?
I guess I’ll have to see how many people I can convince not to use Outlook 2007. I think the only way to affect the decision making here is financially painful for the Office team.
I can’t believe I’m posting something this mean and bitter. I just can’t believe how much of a step back positioning is now. This is just nuts. Can I have my hour back now?
June 15th, 2007 at 9:55 am
Why, why, why, do they keep going about things that counter what they are saying outwardly. Working on driving technology forward, but don’t care to follow established standards? This isn’t a call that has gone unheard, it is a choice that they have made to continue not to support standards. How are we, their customers supposed to respond to this? Over time, people will rebel, and tell them to piss off. They really ought to stop with the whole “we control the market” attitude.
June 19th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
[…] More great articles, all saying the same thing. I am not the only one unhappy with Microsoft on this. […]
June 26th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
As a partner in a design firm dedicated solely to email creative, we are seeing a lot of unhappiness and frustration on the part of our clients with regards to the latest version of Outlook 2007.
There are many issues to be concerned with, but the four most important things that need to be fixed in Outlook 2007 are:
1) Background image support
2) Allow for 1 pixel minimum height in graphics so that coders can create 1 pixel high borders instead of having to substitute images.
3) Properly support image height and scaling dimensions. This causes a lot of frustration for coders using spacer.gif graphics when trying to match the design to pixel perfection.
4) Please support animated GIFs.
Thank you for the excellent post. I hope much of this helps inform the Outlook team where they need to focus their efforts on an upgrade.
July 2nd, 2007 at 7:34 pm
The fact that IE7 has moved forward in embracing standards, and Outlook has taken this giant step backwards, only goes to show that Microsoft is poorly organized internally.
I work for a creative agency, and we design a lot of HTML emails using inline CSS and positioning. We use positioning to get around the lack of background image support in the previous version of Outlook. Putting an inline image in place, then positioning text content on top of it, was a highly effective method for producing some really sharp-looking designs that would normally not be associated with a simple email.
Now, that is all thrown out the window.
As an Apple user, I often get accused of knee-jerk Microsoft bashing, but to me this is a textbook case of precisely WHY designers and web developers hate your company’s guts. You have departments blithely making decisions that impact thousands of people who make a living from working with Internet technologies, with seemingly little common sense or research applied to those decisions.
The best solution would be to use IE7’s rendering engine for HTML, not Word. Why on earth would anyone in their right mind think that a WORD PROCESSOR is more appropriate than A WEB BROWSER for HTML?
This is one of the stupidest decisions I’ve ever seen come out of Microsoft, and I have seen some really stupid decisions.
I sincerely hope that Vista goes down in flames and takes Microsoft with it.
July 3rd, 2007 at 1:40 pm
I’m a web designer and saw all my newsletter templates go to waste after seeing their awful rendering in Outlook 2007 (because of background images). I will now create new one within the horrible Microsoft Word rendering limitations. I think it’s a big mistake from Microsoft to limit creatives like this!
July 19th, 2007 at 9:46 am
A dangerous mistake for Microsoft. With all that is happening these days with their competition, and legal issues, etc. what were they thinking? Is MS a masochistic company inviting the wrath of its users just because.
The Outlook 2007 strategy was not very well thought out. My belief is that people will move away from Outlook because of this blunder on MS’s part.
Designing all together new templates for newsletters is indeed a waste of productivity. If MS wants to travel backward in time, what’s next - a return to MS-DOS?
July 19th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
It’s like a stereo maker abandoning CDs to return to 8-track.
July 20th, 2007 at 9:28 am
The first time I noticed this change was when using Outlook on my company’s Exchange server testing a rich e-mail my company was producing for one of our clients, and a background image was gone.
I cannot imagine why there is a lack of backround-image CSS support in anything that calls itself “HTML”.
I would rather have a more rudimentary HTML editor in Word for a more full-featured display. Do you know what we have to do now, whenever we have text that needs to render over an image? We have to either change our design entirely, or we have to render the text onto an image - too bad for people who use text readers.
I wish I’d found this room sooner so that I could have expressed my concern. This really is an unacceptable change.
July 25th, 2007 at 5:55 am
what astonishes me is that did nobody at Microsoft consider this might be a mistake - did they do *any* research?
Speak to anyone using Lotus notes?
Many Notes users dislike that they cant get useable html emails.
Did someone from Lotus get a job at MS and instigate this to bring everyone down to their level - or a saboteur from OpenOff… ?
And what does Word’s html look like?? hmmm? clean and tidy, compact?
Forms: um, what’s a form team? - dunno let’s chuck em.
That will be fun for the charity site I did some for 3 years ago.
July 27th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Great. I have now been forewarned.nd what does Word’s html look like too
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:18 am
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August 3rd, 2007 at 8:32 am
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August 3rd, 2007 at 8:36 am
Thanks Good CSS Support is critical.
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:47 am
This is typical Microsoft BS. They never learn.
August 3rd, 2007 at 9:02 am
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August 3rd, 2007 at 9:38 am
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August 3rd, 2007 at 9:40 am
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August 3rd, 2007 at 9:41 am
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August 3rd, 2007 at 10:30 am
This is *unbelieveable*. It’s bad enough having two rendering engines on the same platform, but then *choosing* to use the worst one, for your own end and to the detriment not only of every designer out there but the progression of the technology itself, is just…well, it’s the reason so many people despise Microsoft. One step forward (finally) with IE7, six steps back with Outlook. *sigh*
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:31 am
Having only recently been forced to work on HTML emails, I’d rather see all email clients start supporting HTML properly (or not at all! seriously). MS just seems to want Outlook emails to work in Outlook, ignoring the reality that Outlook is just one email client in the market.
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:32 am
A simple software development idea:
In Outlook 2007, create a little bit of code that lets the user pick their rendering engine based upon the software on their computer. In the Outlook Options pop-up screens, this little bit of code would display all available HTML rendering engines (e.g. IE7, Firefox, Office, Opera) currently available on the user’s computer and let the user choose.
In this model, I would prefer the default rendering engine be IE7 given that this would be Microsoft’s code. Not Office. Using the Options pop-up to select other rendering engines also would be an elegant way to avoid anti-trust issues.
Of course, whatever happens, I’d strongly suggest they upgrade the Office rendering engine to IE7 since they seem to want to integrate the Office rendering engine with Outlook email. Fix the Office rendering problem first (by integrating IE7) then integrate it with Outlook with this sort of code widget to let the users ultimately decide.
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August 3rd, 2007 at 12:26 pm
t will be interesting to see how compatible the email is since the Word and PPT files need a converter sent to the recipients to be able to open those respective documents.
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August 8th, 2007 at 1:48 am
Certainly the obvious answer is to fix the Word rendering engine to be fully standards compliant. All they have done in reality is to juggle the focus of the problem to point to the lowest common denominator rather than raising the LCD to the standard of the higher.
My personal pet peeve is the tendency of Microsoft html e-mail to insist upon adding full formatting codes to every individual line of entered text, rather than merely changing the formatting when the format actually changes.
I have here a 283 byte text message that Outlook html expands to around 10,000 bytes with it’s extra bloat.
The other peeve is “winmail.dat”! Outlook express not only doesn’t render them at all, but doesn’t even indicate that it even exists as an attachment! Even my linux e-mail clients handle these messages better than OE.