Outlook 2007 uses the Word 2007 HTML engine!!
This is not cool!
Read Campaign Monitor’s view, and SitePoint’s posting about what Microsoft have done!
I mean, IE7’s CSS capabilities and rendering have finally caught up a bit with FireFox, but now they go an use a completely inferior engine for Outlook! Ok, ok, I know many of you don’t care, because you prefer plain text Times New Roman or Courier emails, but this really does mess around with many companies professional looking corporate image newsletters etc. HTML and CSS have made email worth reading without falling asleep. Bandwidth is getting cheaper, and more accessible, so email size is less of an issue.
I guess security is an excuse, but it’s not a good enough excuse for me. Fight back! Don’t give in to hackers and virus creators!
I think many people (designers / developers / copywriters / etc) are now going to be faced with even greater cross-emailreader compatibility issues in terms of their designs. We might be forced to keep it plain and boring, and possibly use html table-based designs (no float support), which quite honestly is probably more bloated than straight forward neat CSS.
I guess there’s not much one can do about it… Microsoft have decided what they gonna do, and that’s that. I think it’s disappointing.