At work last week, I kept busy creating what ultimately became the new, R-MC Alumni newsletter. We've been working with a third-party vendor on this project, primarily for infrastructure support (sending out the emails) but they were also in charge of assembling the templated design (or "email stationery" in their marketing vernacular).
During the design process, however, we hit some snags.
To preface what is to follow, I need to point out that when it comes to CSS and HTML, I'm anal. Yes, I admit it.
- I feel that <style> belongs in the document <head>, not the <body>.
- Properly formatted XHTML tags should be in lower-case.
- Anything that SHOULD be CSS controlled... should be... (drop the friggin "align" from then "<div>" already)
- I hate bgcolor attributes. (see above #3 too)
- etc.
I guess I'm just crazy tough like that...
The email vendor on the project doesn't share my same view of web code, and that lead to some disagreements on implementation. As it would turn out, only some of my arguments about properly formatted code were valid in the realm of HTML email, and a few were incorrect.
With that said, however, I'm not convinced that our email vendor
knew that what they were doing incorrectly was --in fact-- going to be
right in the end. In my opinion, I think it was happy coincidence that their invalid markup wound up being ideal.
And we can thank Microsoft for that.
Yes, the "kings" of standards compliance are at it again -- to that end, Microsoft has found a new front for their war against the
W3C and web developers.
This time though, they're not using their maleficent web browser rendering engine to make a mess of the web and to wreak havoc in the development world.
This go-around is strictly with Outlook and Microsoft has done well. And, once again, the platform in which the problem exists still reigns supreme in its genre, so its not something that can be ignored.
The issue, in a nutshell, is that Microsoft's Office development team elected to
remove Internet Explorer as the rendering engine for HTML email in favor of the Word 2007 rendering engine.
So, what?
Well, the Word 2007 rendering engine has extremely spotty rendering capabilities for CSS. Positioning is completely gone, but
some fundamentals are basically gone or horribly bugged too (object backgrounds, for one).
Here are a few more things that Outlook 2007
won't be doing:
- 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
Now, I'm sure some readers will look at the examples in the above list and thinks "so what?"
Or, even more likely,
"Good! I never wanted animated GIFs or Flash in my HTML emails anyway!"
That's beside the point, in my opinion; to me, the real issue is the
removal of basic functionality, and the restriction of what one person can decide on their own to consume (or not to consume) via HTML email in Outlook. That is, if a recipient
wants to receive Flash and/or animated GIFs in their email, then the more power to them. They should be allowed to read what they please, and Microsoft shouldn't be permitted to make arbitrary decisions to the contrary in overruling that user.
From a code perspective, I'm also extremely disappointed to see a forced return to tables-based design and deprecated HTML. That said though, I've grown somewhat accustomed to the general lack of respect on the park of Microsoft to web standards.
Anyway, we were ultimately able to make the email stationery consistent from Outlook 2007 to all the
other mail clients out there, so it was mission (basically) accomplished and the newsletters went out on Friday.
Under the hood of the final newsletter product, however, you'll find a kludge of tables, font tags, in-line CSS and div aligns. I'm not happy about that, but resigned to the reality of Outlook 2007.
Labels: "html mail", FAIL, Outlook 2007, rendering, tilting at windmills
