• Apr252007

    Oh Microsoft what have you gone and done now?

    Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

    Office 2007I 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.

    What are they thinking? While it appears they support inline-styles, this is still a long way from being at least a decent upgrade instead it is a major step backwards. A short list of what isn’t supported in the new Outlook/Word 2007 HTML rendering engine uncovers a very sad state of affairs:

    no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
    no support for multiple nested tables with background colors applied
    no support for forms
    no support for Flash, or other plugins
    no support for CSS floats
    no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
    no support for CSS positioning
    no support for animated GIFs

    I struggle to understand this decision and why Microsoft continues to steer away from supporting widely accepted W3C HTML standards (yes I know IE7 was a step in the right direction but I’m not 100% satisfied.)

    “HTML has nearly universal adoption among consumers: A Jupiter Research consumer survey found just 3% receive only text email.” taken from emaillabs.com

    I’ve read many posts that support the “text-only” approach which in my opinion is simply the easy way out, and I know simply complaining about this isn’t going to change Microsoft’s mind and at least have them use their own IE7 HTML engine *gasp*… I have always built the email messages for my clients using the tried-and-true tables with inline styles method and I’m sure things will be fine with that practice going forward but isn’t this a huge step backwards for web-standards and HTML email marketers worldwide?

    • Post a Comment 4 Comments

    1. Posted at 4:52 am on 04/27/07

      Joshua Hughes

      I never cease to be amazed at the incompetence of Microsoft. Vista’s amusing similarities to the Mac OS, the consistent failure of IE to come up to an adequate standard, and now this :-) Sadly though, the people who recognise the problems are in a pretty small minority, and the huge market-share which Microsoft commands ensures that their screwed up ideas are accepted without question by 80% of the world’s PC users. They have an awful lot to answer for!!

    2. Posted at 8:02 am on 04/27/07

      Jay

      Well, whenever I have to use Windows, there is at least one small thing that happens that sends me into a blind rage. Perhaps I need to take it easy, but the fact that so many people use something that is so poorly designed baffles me.

    3. Posted at 7:57 pm on 04/27/07

      Gene

      There’s another side to this too I think. What type of security implication does it have to use the Word HTML rendering engine. Wouldn’t IE7 have much higher security/protection than Word when it comes to viewing HTML or whatever?

    4. Posted at 2:38 pm on 06/27/07

      apsiikxfek

      Thanks for this site!
      hifue.info

    Comments RSS |  Trackback |  del.icio.us |  Digg

    Post a Comment

Contact

1207 Lincoln Street
Columbia, SC 29201
803.588.9310 Phone
877.415.4259 Fax
info@period-three.com

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Add to Technorati Favorites