http://fixoutlook.org/Point:We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages.
Counterpoint:This is certainly music to our ears. The only problem is that “broadly adopted standards” already exist for HTML email. They are called web standards, and almost every email client on the market meets these standards. It doesn’t make sense to advocate a completely different set of standards to stipulate how HTML should be rendered in an email client as opposed to a web browser.
It’s important to remember the W3C’s CSS standard was created back in 1996. Not only that, but Outlook 2000 offered fantastic CSS support. The fact that software released 10 years later offers significantly less standards support does not reflect that Microsoft “understand that e-mail is about interoperability”.
Personal:Developing sophisticated, fully compliant sites is part of my job and generally the end goal of everyone at my company. Making those sites work in IE6 literally consumes 10-20% extra time and when a particularly brutal failure comes along it can double the length of the task. Now we have to go back and take a look at all our HTML email generation tools. Quite honestly, my vote is to throw in the towel and start plugging in tables. Toss away five years of progress for what? So a monkey can create rich emails?
Bah. *goshdarn* Microsoft. Three letters *bunghole*s - W3C.
