How microsoft plans to kill email...

Microsoft , so it seems, has decided to change Outlooks email rendering engine from the IE rendering engine to, wait for it, the MS Word HTML rendering engine. Why you ask, well simple this way only emails created in Outlook will now render properly in Outlook. Here is a list, released by Microsoft of what will and won't be supported. Some of the major problems with this include: No background images on divs or cells, no support for float or position meaning layout via CSS is out the window, no animated gifs or flash objects. Fortunately(?) Microsoft have release a CSS validator to help you validate your HTML and CSS. Unfortunalty(?) it is only supported by the following applications: Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, Microsoft Web Expressions 2007, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004, and Macromedia Dreamweaver 8. Get that here. To quote this guy.

This really is a game changer. Previously you could send a HTML email in the comfort that the majority of your recipients would have very good CSS support. Other email clients were also catching up. Thunderbird uses the Firefox rendering engine, the new Yahoo! Mail beta has great CSS support. Things were looking good for us CSS based email designers. Unfortunately, that all goes down the toilet now. If your email breaks in Notes or Eudora, it was often an acceptable casualty, but if it breaks in Outlook, you're more than likely ostracizing too many recipients to justify your design approach. This certainly doesn't spell the end for HTML email, it just takes us back 5 years where tables and nasty inline CSS was the norm. Imagine for a second that the new version of IE7 killed off the majority of CSS support and only allowed table based layouts. The web design world would be up in arms! Well, that's exactly what the new version of Outlook does to email designers.

What are your views on the matter?

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