Text 15783, 62 rader
Skriven 2007-01-31 19:07:48 av mike (1:379/45)
Ärende: Users Upset at Outlook HTML Change
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From: mike <mike@barkto.com>



http://www.betanews.com/article/1170262954

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Microsoft has made the decision to use the Word HTML rendering engines for both
the reading and composing of messages within Outlook 2007, a decision that has
been criticized by those who use HTML e-mail frequently.

The change means that many e-mails who may have displayed perfectly within
Outlook in previous versions may look seriously jumbled in the latest
incarnation. There's a simple reason for this: Word supports far less HTML
standards.

Before Office 2007, the Word rendering engine was used only to compose mail,
while Internet Explorer was used to view them. This opened the doors for
design-rich messages, and Outlook was considered one of the best platforms.

Now, many of those HTML and CSS attributes are gone, leaving some messages a
mess and looking nothing like the sender intended. Gone is support for
background images, forms, plugins, animated GIFs, among others.

Redmond explains its decision as such: "A big thing we heard from customers is
that they wanted the richness of the editing experience they were used to from
Word integrated throughout Outlook. While Internet Explorer 7.0 is great, it
was never intended to be an editing tool," it said in a Knowledge Base article.

That reasoning was not good enough for many. Mailing list software creator
David Greiner was one of those to first criticize the move shortly after it was
revealed that Word would be the new rendering engine.

"Imagine for a second that the new version of IE7 killed off the majority of
CSS support and only allowed table based layouts," he wrote in a Web log post
in mid-January. "The web design world would be up in arms! Well, that's exactly
what the new version of Outlook does to email designers."

Jonathan Nicol, a graphic designer, said that Microsoft had "screwed up
royally" with the change. "None of these limitations is going to make the task
of designing HTML emails impossible, but they will ensure that no advances are
made in this field for a good number of years."

Broadsided by the criticism, Microsoft is now attempting to perform damage
control. However, in the Knowledge Base article, it stops short of promising to
add back the CSS and HTML support that e-mail designers are complaining about.

"The Word team is continually examining HTML and CSS support based on customer
feedback," it said.
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Wow, I would imagine that those users who have paid more than $500 for a MS
Office 2007 upgrade will not be pleased to see the functionality of MS Outlook
decreased by the upgrade.



   /m

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