This was news to me, but it does explain some of the weirdness in the HTML display in some of the Outlook e-mail messages I receive.
At the risk of turning this newsletter into a biweekly Microsoft bash, Redmond has done it again. While the IE team was soothing the tortured souls of web developers everywhere with the new, more compliant Internet Explorer 7, the Office team pulled a fast one, ripping out the IE-based rendering engine that Outlook has always used for email, and replacing it with … drum roll please … Microsoft Word.
That’s right. Instead of taking advantage of Internet Explorer 7, Outlook 2007 uses the very limited support for HTML and CSS that is built into Word 2007 to display HTML email messages.
I got the information from a recent SitePoint Tech Times newsletter. This does seem really unbelievable to me. The SitePoint article goes on to share some of the gaps in Word’s HTML support that now affects Outlook HTML display
- 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
What’s up Microsoft? Why in the world would you go down this path?
