Outlook 2007 and HTML Emails
Added Tuesday 24/06/2008
Ever had the feeling you'd gone one step forward and taken five steps back. Well being a newbie in web development, I feel like I've taken a million steps backwards due to the so called "improved" Microsoft Outlook 2007.
Having only developing websites for a year, I have been fortunate enough to start my education when there have been some strict XHTML guidelines to ensure that your website is valid (meaning that it complies with the De-Facto Standard set out by the w3 consortium).
This meant that ALL styling was done in style sheets and all content was placed in HTML pages. I also didn't have to worry about the deprecated values of HTML as they had been replaced by new and improved ones. Well, that was what I thought...until now.
With Microsoft Internet Explorer making leaps and bounds with ensuring it conformed to the standards that an internet browser should adhere to (comparing IE6 to IE7) and Microsoft Outlook 2003 using the HTML rendering engine to display its emails, everyone was coming along nicely. We were allowed to develop in an environment where we could guarantee the public were seeing a page the way we intended.
But now we are having to reform back to the old way of developing, (well, with email creation anyway). As apposed to its 2003 counterpart, Outlook 2007 now uses Microsoft Word's HTML rendering engine.
The popular 'DIV' in modern website development has been replaced by 'TABLES', which happened to be the way websites were first built. Obviously, you can still use DIV's but with styling such as floats, clears, display's and background images no longer supported, you may feel (as I do), what is the point.
So now were back with tables, things aren't so bad. I would agree with that, if I could control every email we (Clients of and including Totally Communications) send. However this is somewhat unfeasible as we allow our clients to send their own emails through our content management system, with use of a template for them to enter their text into. So things like wrapping text around images are out of the window.
Admittedly things could have been a lot worse, however I think its fair to say (and many people would agree with me,) that we really have taken severe steps backwards and we can only hope that Microsoft will not wait four years before replacing this version of Office.
For a full list of supported HTML elements and attributes, please follow the links below:
msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338200.aspx
msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx
*I would like to stress that I have no issue with Microsoft as a company, with this blog entry only providing my opinion on Microsoft Outlook 2007.*
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