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Email designers are up in arms today at the release of Outlook 2007. Up until the latest release of this software Outlook 2007 was using Internet Explorer’s rendering engine but with the latest changes it drastically reduces Outlooks capability to render properly marked-up semantics based CSS/XHTML.
Some sites have even gone as far to say that Microsoft’s latest change to the software Takes email design back 5 years.
It is sad that Microsoft is this out of touch with web/email developer’s today. Most every web developer I know has for the last few years been recommending FireFox and Thunderbird for web and email browsing solely because Microsoft makes inferior web products.
The new Outlook will use Word’s HTML rendering engine, the CSS properties that this engine currently supports can be found on their site.
Alot of email designers are acting like this is the end of the world, it isn’t. Table based design is just as easy and efficient as CSS design and will work in this engine. CSS unfortunately has never been supported fully across the board in email clients. Even in prior versions of Outlook and most other browsers a stylesheet hack is needed to get minimal support.
You would think that Microsoft would have taken the opportunity to become a leader in CSS support as they did have one of the better browsers for it…
I wonder if perhaps they have an upgrade to the HTML rendering engine in Word in progress though, or if they will be releasing some kind of newsletter service sometime soon, as in the current climate the change seems utterly incomprehensible and absurd to anyone in the world of email marketing.
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