Microsoft is well known for doing it’s own thing and making it hard for web designers and developers, but their latest revelation is a classic.
It’s well known that a massive percentage of users, especially corporate users use Outlook as their email client.
Now, the HTML rendering engine in Outlook uses internet explorer when displaying HTML in emails etc. This, until now has been reasonably good.
Now, in the new version of office (2007), they have abandoned using IE as the rendering engine and changed over to Word 2007! What the hell are they thinking of? When I read this yesterday I had to check if it was April Fool’s day. What a joke.
From a Microsoft article:
“Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses the HTML parsing and rendering engine from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to display HTML message bodies. The same HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) support available in Word 2007 is available in Outlook 2007.”
Here are a few of the limitations that we will soon have to deal with:
- no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
- 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
More detail in Microsoft’s article.
Get ready for a bumpy ride if you use snazzy HTML email newsletters on your website! A few headaches on the horizon I reckon.
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January 12th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
About the only thing I can think of is that to fool the hackers, Microsoft have moved away from Internet Explorer 7 to fooled them with Word ‘07.
It’s so inexplicable as to be laughable…
January 12th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Yep, it’s a joke. The hackers will still be able to exploit the Word ‘07 vulnerabilities though.