Fix Outlook!
As both a software and Web developer, I have two very different opinions of Microsoft. On the one hand, Microsoft creates fantastic developer tools like Visual Studio and their .Net platform is quite nice. As a Web developer though, you have IE, a browser used by the vast majority of the world but unfortunately also the least standard compatible browser and a major pain when it comes to coding standard compliant web sites.
For some time now, the folks at the Email Standards Project have been working to help Web developers understand the limitations of the various email clients with regards to HTML rendering. That site is quite useful by the way, but this is not the reason of this blog post.
Today I want to talk about Fix Outlook!, an initiative by the Email Standards Project to convince Microsoft not to use the Word rendering engine to render HTML emails in Outlook for Office 2010. If you’ve ever designed an HTML email campaign for a client, you know how painful it can be to test all the different clients and by the look of it, Outlook 2010 will make it even worse. Go on the Fix Outlook! site and have a look at the same email rendered in Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2010 to understand the extent of the damage. By using Word to render the email, Outlook basically loses most of its CSS support.
What’s sad here is that this isn’t some small piece of unknown shareware, it’s a major new version of a software that will probably be used by tens of not hundreds of millions of users around the world for several years. Just like a new version of Internet Explorer, this new version of Outlook will have a major impact on what’s possible and what’s not possible with HTML emails in the near future.
Please support the Fix Outlook campaign by tweeting. Visit the site for more information. Let’s hope Microsoft will get the message and will use a real HTML rendering engine for its email client.
If only they had such a thing in house…