HTML Email Standards
Yeah, Microsoft did this really fucked thing where they changed their email layout renderer in Outlook 2007 from the HTML renderer in IE6, to the layout renderer of Word. There was no real justification for it and the line from MS was ‘Our customers wanted something that rendered layouts the same in their email as it does in Word’.
I don’t really need to point out this is complete and utter shit, as we all know that MS’s customers wouldn’t know their own arse from Arial when it comes to crafting layouts.
The ramifications for everyone that uses email is that those that use MS Outlook 2007 will not be able to correctly view HTML-Email, and they will no-longer be able to send well laid out emails to anyone without Outlook 2007.
I am sure Ballmer was thinking it was totally fucken genius because clearly the plan was to get everyone using the Word layout renderer in emails so that anyone that wanted to send a formatted email had to use Office, just like they did with ordinary documents in the 90s. Slight problem with the plan – people aren’t upgrading to Outlook 2007 in the droves MS had predicted and now all their Outlook 2007 customers are the ones locked out of the world of email formatting – ooops.
This move also put a lot of developers, designers and email marketers (and spamming bastards) noses out of joint, but instead of just rolling over with their arses in the air and asking MS to be gentle as a lot of soft-cock web developers have done time and time again in the past, there has actually been some collaboration, organisation and a general hardening-the-fuck-up and a new movement has started in the area of HTML Email Standards.
Link to these awesome people and tell all your friends. They have moxy. They have chops.