Outlook 2007 And HTML Email

When developing web sites, one of the things we often have to do is put fixes in the code to work around bugs in Internet Explorer. This is getting better with IE8 and IE7 but IE6 still has a large market share and it’s the worst damn browser in the world for standards compliance®. Typically we make a lovely site, then test in IE6, bang head on desk, fix, test and repeat. Oh the joy. But all of this is nothing, nothing I tell you, compared to the travesty that is the HTML rendering in Outlook 2007. When Microsoft introduced the “upgrade” to Outlook they stuck Outlook with the HTML rendering engine used in Word. It’s like the early nineties all over again. They made the rendering worse in the “upgrade”. Grrr. Whenever I try to use it I feel sullied, disappointed and sick. What were they thinking? Am now going to lie down in a darkened standards compliant place.