As a professional designer of web sites and e-mail communications, I think it’s very important to adhere to standards. Any designer worth her salt uses the best tools for the job and keeps up with the evolution of standards as defined by the W3C. That’s why I’ve spent years learning to write beautiful, lean, mean, efficient standards-adherent CSS and HTML.
One of the thorns in designers’ sides is having to write “fixes” into our code to make up for Internet Explorer’s failings. With the recent release of Internet Explorer 7, a number of those failings were corrected and so we had hope that perhaps Microsoft was finally coming around and using W3C standards and stopping the crazy cycle of developing “standards” of its own, the equivalent of taking its toys from the Internet sandbox and going home.
HOWEVER. Oh, and do I mean HOWEVER. With the recent release of the Outlook 2007 e-mail program for PCs (and by recent I mean January… yes, I am a little behind), Microsoft decided not to include the newly developed Internet Explorer 7 HTML rendering engine and instead to use the Word engine to render HTML in emails. The non-standards-compliant, circa-1997-ish Word rendering engine.
A huge percentage of people use PCs, and a large percentage of those users use Outlook as their primary e-mail program, and that means that Microsoft has effectively taken e-mail design back a decade. How can designers NOT comply with these arbitrary rules set by the maker of the most popular email program on the planet? We have to. We are forced to play their game, and write bad code to accommodate this brand new, horribly crippled e-mail program, otherwise a majority of our users would receive e-mails that look like shit. And e-mails that look like shit make users think poorly of your brand and your company.
What this means for me and countless other e-mail designers is that, because Outlook no longer supports a number of extremely basic HTML and CSS tags, we will now have to begin using outdated bloated code to assure that our e-mails display properly in Outlook 2007. It does not support, among other things, background images in divs and table cells, float positioning, and ALT TAGS. Yes, you read that right: it does not support alt tags. You know how when you get an email and the images don’t load, but a little bit of text displays in their place so you can tell what it’s supposed to be? That little text bitlet is an alt tag. And they’ve gone bye bye. And since background images are no longer supported, our emails will become much plainer and less attractive.
Microsoft’s reasoning is, apparently, that since the majority of their business users use Word to create HTML emails, then Outlook needs to use the same engine to display them.
I say, bullshit. There is NO REASON why Outlook should not make use of modern, standards compliant code rendering. If anything, they need to fucking update the craptastic Word rendering engine.
In both my professional and freelance lives, I am now going to have to begin redesigning everything I do to accommodate Outlook 2007. It will be more work for less payoff. We designers are used to having to write CSS that will degrade gracefully in older browsers; I never thought I’d have to write code that will degrade gracefully in the newest version of the most popular email program made by the largest software company in the world.
Way to go, Microsoft.
This is pure genius!
How cool is this! 
oh. my. god. much as the thought of it makes me squirm, i have to go see this. it is going to be so painfully uncomfortable to watch. i was never into miniature gaming or hard-core play-by-the-rules role playing, but i did play dungeons & dragons from about the ages of 14 to 18, and occasionally did LARP. if you don’t know what that is, i’m not going to further embarrass myself by explaining it.