Microsoft forces backward step in email design
Friday, January 12th, 2007
Outlook 2007 is to use MS Word’s rendering engine rather than its new Internet Explorer 7 engine, breaking most modern CSS designed emails.
The main reasoning seems to be that because Outlook uses the Word engine to create emails, it should use Word to display them in order to get consistent results. However this does not account for the many emails sent from non-Outlook clients.
Surely, Microsoft are approaching the problem from the wrong end - shouldn’t Word produce HTML compatible with its IE rendering engine (and all other web browsers on other platforms).
With Outlook having ~75% corporate market share, is it time to go back to using tables and images?
More coverage at Campaign Monitor.