Just when you think the powers above cannot make our lives harder they kick you right in the balls and today that came in the form of Microsoft announcing that Outlook 2010 intends to continue to use the antediluvian Microsoft Word rendering engine that it uses in Outlook 2007. Microsoft avoided using a browser to render HTML emails in Outlook 2007, instead using a word processor which forced designers like me to dump standards-based email design and to use tables and font tags. By by the look of the beta version of Outlook 2010, Microsoft have decided to stick to this rather than to keep up with the times and actually adopt web standards.

Campaign Monitor have been fighting to get Microsoft to stick to Web Standards since Outlook 2007 first came out and they have more information about this, including a response from Outlook product Dev Balasubramanian:

“The reason for this lies in the benefit Outlook users gain by having Word as their e-mail authoring tool; rich tools like SmartArt, automatic styles and templates, and other benefits found in Word 2007 and 2010 enable Outlook users to write professional looking and visually stunning messages.”

“I am aware of where this decision on our part places Outlook from a standards perspective – at the same time, we ask that you consider the benefits Outlook users get from having Word tools in their e-mail authoring experience.”

“Having multiple HTML engines could reduce performance, as well as create an inconsistency in terms of what type of content the user is able to create vs. consume.”

What this would mean is HTML emails created in Outlook would look great in my friend’s outlook but look completely messed up in email clients of everyone else who don’t use Outlook. How does Microsoft justify this? Isn’t this just taking us back in to the propietary stone age!!

I really hope Microsoft listen to everyone’s feedback and actually do something about it!!