A Public Comment to Microsoft Regarding Outlook

In response to the rising campaign against Outlook 2010’s decision to use the Word rendering engine for HTML emails, Microsoft released a public statement today, which you can read here. I left a comment on the site, but they’re moderating, so I’m not sure if it’ll actually get published. Just in case, I figured I will publicly reproduce it below:

This is absurd. No wide consensus? We’re not even really talking HTML, here, we’re talking CSS — and CSS rules like “float” have been around since 1.

The real problem here is that you’re unable or unwilling to make your various formatting tools (shown above) spit out proper HTML, so that your email client can _read_ proper HTML/CSS. In addition, you’re stating that because no clear industry standard exists for HTML emails, you think the best solution is to use the rendering engine of a proprietary text processor. Aside from that being a flawed conclusion, in my opinion, the basis is also terribly wrong: I believe the success of this Twitter campaign makes it quite obvious that a standard does exist. Perhaps you should start a campaign for _preserving_ the Word Engine and see how many retweets you get.

Apologies if this is a bit of a flame comment, but come on — it’s Outlook 2010. One would think it could render HTML emails better than Netscape Navigator 4. Like I said, this is just absurd.