Last year, a client of mine decided that they needed a monthly newsletter. No problem, said i, we can handle that fine. Personally, i hate HTML email. I don't use it. I loathe having to create it. But it's what the client wanted, and it didn't seem like too big a deal. We'd do it, as long as we weren't doing anything Evil.
So, the client said, it simply *must* have the same design as the website. That's a problem, we replied, but what we'll do is use the same design styles to create a simpler version. We don't need the entire web interface for an email, just some of the same look & feel. Away we toiled, testing in all the major mail clients. We cried, a little, when things just refused to work in the various webmails. Gmail would barf on the fix we used to get Yahoo! to behave. And Hotmail, at first only a little bit messy, became an insufferable PITA over some ridiculously simple mark-up. And don't even think of relying on any of them to respect the UTF-8 encoding, since they're displaying inside of a third-party web interface. But, eventually, things came together. The glitches had been smothered under a wealth of hokey "fixes" and resigned compromises (nothing new there). But i just came across a little tidbit that i thought i'd share: Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007 http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/01/10/microsoft-breaks-html-email-rendering-in-outlook/ -- snip -- If support for web standards in browsers is improving slowly, then support in email clients is moving at a glacial pace. Attempts to document things like CSS support in the major email clients have revealed a depressing state of affairs, but with recent desktop clients like Thunderbird now sitting on solid rendering engines, things have been looking up. All that changed when Microsoft dropped a lump of coal into every web developer’s stocking with the end-of-year release to business customers, and the upcoming consumer release, of Outlook 2007. At the risk of turning this newsletter into a biweekly Microsoft bash, Redmond has done it again. While the IE team was soothing the tortured souls of web developers everywhere with the new, more compliant Internet Explorer 7, the Office team pulled a fast one, ripping out the IE-based rendering engine that Outlook has always used for email, and replacing it with … drum roll please … *Microsoft Word*. -- snip -- I'm going to ignore the suggestion that IE7 has made me relaxed about MS's crap, because, frankly, this is the most disturbing news yet in the annals of their abysmal "support" for standards. They're using *Word??!* Obviously, in order to use IE7's sparkling New Technology to render HTML in their flagship email client, they would have had to, you know, put some resources into updating Outlook. My guess is that the Outlook internals are so badly messed up that they realised it would tax their tens-of-thousands-strong developers far too much to re-tool it to use the new IE rendering engine. R.I.P HTML email. We hardly knew ye. ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d IE7 information -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=IE7 List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
