The New Rules for HTML Email
For all those who don’t know about the new crop of Gotcha’s that have been thrown against us hapless devs by your favorite demon and mine, Microsoft, the new version of Outlook (2007) will be rendering html email using the incredibly broken Word html rendering engine instead of the newly improved IE7 rendering engine. Which, to me and everybody else, seems a HUGE STEP BACKWARDS instead of the great leap forward they would have been taking had they used the IE7 renderer.
What does this mean in practical terms? It means we who create html emails all going to be writing Monkey HTML.
The way I conquered this little debacle was this–
- All css styles are inline, nothing pulled from outside the email
- No images for backgrounds, all images as img tags.
- No floats or other positioning. We’re back to using tables.
- No animated gifs or flash
- Forms don’t work. (Link to forms on your website, or give them up.)
- Simple tables, no nests, or you’ll run into background color problems.
- And test in the newly created Microsoft Email Validator early and often.
The most important advice I can give you is to follow the KISS rule– Keep It Stupidly Simple! Stupid being Outlook 2007, of course.
Now, reading the buzz about this online, it’s hard to come up with a sensible sounding reason for the MS team to have made this, on the face of it, BIZARRE decision. I’ve read from Mac Fanboys that this is one of Microsoft’s diabolical plans to make useless the great xhtml/css rendering support in the newest Mac email client version, which does actually sound at least somewhat plausible, if maybe a bit reaching, given MS anti competitive tactics of the past. After all, if I have a mail list that’s only going to 10% or less Mac users and a percentage a fair amount greater than that to Outlook 2007 users, then everyone is going to be getting a dumbed down experience.
I’ve also read that now that IE7 has a quasi sandbox around it, that it makes it harder for them to get Outlook to interface with IE7, so it was easier to just use Word to render, since it was already somewhat available for the interface. This doesn’t sound right to me, since MS has never before been afraid of codebloat, and I don’t see why they just wouldn’t include another possibly stripped down IE7 rendering engine within Office or Outlook, or code another few zillion lines of supposedly security conscious code to allow Outlook to use IE7. In other words, there IS no sensible reason, or at least not one that anyone from MS is spitting out.
Re how and who this will affect- home users will be using Outlook Express or other email clients, the vast majority of which are more nimble at rendering html than Outlook 2007. So if you market mostly to home users you might safely ignore this issue. The people it will most affect are Corporate Users who use the entire MS package, including Outlook 2007, and will be among the first to upgrade.
Is it now impossible to write html emails? No, but it is a challenge for a Standards Compliant Coder to revisit the days of tag soup and tables.
I’m just glad I don’t get these types of jobs very often . . .
Technorati Tags: html email, Outlook 2007
February 27th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Oh, gosh. I’m the luckiest person in the world - I don’t have ONE CLIENT who does html emails.
Dodged a bullet that time….
June 26th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Are you not aware that Microsoft has an interest in keeping Windows insecure. That fuels the anti-malware industry, and I don’t need to tell you how much money is in that industry. Why don’t the anti-malware companies bash M$? Because without M$ they would have no income.
Go get Ubuntu.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:48 am
Um, what does Ubuntu or the insecurity of Microsoft have to do with being a dev who has to develop to THE OP SYSTEMS AND PROGRAMS PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY USING??? Even if I was to “go get Ubuntu” I’d still need to develop my aps/skins/designs to work on the systems/aps that people are using, and most are using some flavor of windows, no matter what we, as devs, may wish.