website design, optimisation and content

Outlook 2010 draws the wrath of Web developers

Posted by Peter Labrow on 26 June 2009

There’s a bit of a row brewing on the Interwebs at the moment between Microsoft and Web standards advocates – and it’s not about Internet Explorer, but the next version of Microsoft’s e-mail client, Outlook.

Although Outlook is almost certainly the world’s most deployed e-mail client, what most of its users don’t realise is quite how poor it is at displaying modern, standards-based HTML. This is more than a bit of a shortcoming, since HTML is pretty much the de facto standard for e-mail – a standard that is supported by most e-mail clients, to some degree or other.

First, let’s see the problem in action. Here’s a screenshot of a nicely designed e-mail in Outlook 2000. (Yes, that’s right, Outlook 2000 wasn’t broken.)

Outlook 2000 screenshot

Now, let’s move forward a decade and see how that e-mail renders in the next version of Outlook, Outlook 2010.

Outlook 2007 screnshot

It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it? So, what’s going on? Has the e-mail designer done a bad job? Why did it look fine in a ten-year-old version of Outlook and not the latest version? You can discuss these screenshots on Flickr.)

This is a topic we’ve covered before with Outlook 2007. Essentially, Microsoft used the Internet Explorer rendering engine to display HTML e-mails in Outlook 2000. For later versions, this was switched to the Word rendering engine – and in Outlook 2007 onwards, there’s no alternative: plain text or Word’s rendering of HTML.

When displaying HTML, the Word rendering engine is – well, quite honestly – a bit rubbish. It doesn’t support many elements of modern HTML. And by modern, we actually mean a decade old. And in ‘Internet time’ a decade is the equivalent of an ice age.

You see, the world has really moved forward in terms of Web standards. Back in the days of Netscape 4 versus Internet Explorer 4, different browsers worked in fundamentally different ways. So, while the World Wide Web is the most global of publishing forums, we actually had a time when some sites only worked in one or other browser. This was a pain for Web developers, and pretty horrific for users too.

Thankfully – and sensibly – the companies which created browsers began to adhere to Web standards, so that most browsers performed more or less consistently. It’s a sad historical fact that Microsoft dragged its feet in this area more than most. Internet Explorer 5 was an awful browser, not only because of partial standards support, but also because it implemented standards badly. Internet Explorer 6 was better, but not much. And, since Microsoft had achieved more than 90% market share with Internet Explorer 6, the company ceased development on it, calling it a ‘job done’.

The change came about with browsers such as Opera, Firefox and Safari, which supported Web standards very well – and grew their market share, at the expense of Microsoft. (Well, not expense, since browsers are free.) It was only this loss of market share, something Microsoft hates more than anything else, that forced Microsoft into action, and so Internet Explorer 7 was born, and it supported Web standards fairly well. Internet Explorer 8 is better still, though it’s still not quite there.

But the end result was a Web where most of the sites look the same and behave the same, regardless of the browser being used. This is very good for us website developers, who can code to recognised standards (therefore we can apply ‘measures of quality’ to our work) and be sure that our creations pretty much always look how they should. But it’s really the users who benefit – even though they may not be aware of it – because they now have the choice to use different browsers, and all browsers have become significantly better as a result of the move to Web standards.

And, while all of that was going on, Microsoft took the Internet Explorer rendering engine from Outlook 2000 (which wasn’t perfect) and slid it into the bin. The replacement does offer a better editing experience, since it’s based on Word – but the display of e-mails is horrific, if they are coded to Web standards.

To get around this, designers of e-mails have to step back nearly fifteen years and code in the same way they would for Netscape and older browsers. Otherwise, their e-mails don’t display properly. It’s a right pain. Imagine your mobile phone taken away and having it replaced by one fifteen years old. That’s how big a difference in available features there is between modern, standards-compliant HTML and ‘the old stuff’.

The E-mail Standards Project has thrown the gauntlet down, and said that ‘enough is enough’ – and so an ‘Outlook’s broken – let’s fix it’ has started, with a Twitter campaign that is already in the tens of thousands – developers and customers asking Microsoft to get with the music.

Microsoft has responded: “There is no widely-recognised consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The ‘E-mail Standards Project’ does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area.”

Though based in fact, this reply is actually disingenuous. True, strictly speaking no one has created an ‘official standard’ for HTML e-mails. But there is a standard for HTML – and not only do most browsers support this (including Microsoft) most other e-mail clients support it too. The ‘standard’ that Microsoft is using is out of date by over a decade and is not fit for purpose. It’s that simple – it doesn’t fit into today’s world any more than a music tape cassette does. It’s true also that the E-mail Standards Project is not a sanctioned body – but it is one that talks a lot of sense and has helped and encouraged other vendors to create better e-mail clients

The problem with Outlook 2007 comes home to roost in two ways. First, when you create a graphical e-mail in Outlook, it displays badly in most other e-mail clients. Second, if you create an HTML e-mail to published, decade-old standards, Outlook can’t display that either. If that’s not broke, I don’t know what is.

With Internet Explorer, Microsoft changed because it had to. It was losing market share very quickly. If Firefox and other browsers hadn’t have come along and upped the game, we’d still be stuck with Internet Explorer 6.

The sad fact is that Microsoft has no such incentive with Outlook. It is the business world’s e-mail client, period. Yes, there are alternatives, and many are better, and they do have lots of users, but in terms of market share, Microsoft owns the keys to the sweet shop. It won’t change Outlook because it doesn’t need to.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Everyone who can should apply some kind of pressure, small or large, to get Microsoft to realise that taking steps backwards in standards, for the sake of development convenience, isn’t on.

For goodness’ sake – it’s 2009. E-mail is about global interoperability, not interoperability between Microsoft products. Is it too much to expect that we can send nicely designed e-mails and have them arrive looking the way we intended, regardless of which e-mail program someone is using? If nearly every other e-mail client can support these standards, why can’t Microsoft’s?

(Footnote: it’s worth noting, for the sake of impartiality, that Microsoft isn’t the only e-mail client with poor Web standards support, though it’s one of the worst. Google Mail and Lotus Notes 8 aren’t that great either, and Windows Live Hotmail is average. Bizarrely, Windows Mail is excellent, so come on Microsoft, we know you can do it!)

Comments

No comments · be the first to add a comment · this blog is moderated