What a lovely textured spash screen. Those were the days.

I was working on creating an HTML email today and found that it was next to impossible to achieve compatibility between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. There didn’t seem to be much material to help me out except this interesting article, which explained the problem.

It turns out that in Outlook 2003, emails are written and displayed using MS Word, but when you view HTML it uses the IE rendering engine. Makes sense I guess. Outlook 2007 on the other hand uses MS Word 2007 rendering both both. This is good in terms of consistency, but dreadful in terms of flexibility. Not only will an HTML email written for outlook 2003 look awful in outlook 2007, but Outlook 2007 simply doesn’t support full HTML, meaning you have to resort to using tables to ensure compatibility.

• no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
• no support for forms
• no support for Flash, or other plugins
• no support for CSS floats
• no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
• no support for CSS positioning
• no support for animated GIFs

But these are all the things that make it worthwhile doing an HTML email. Otherwise the whole internet would be basically a big web of Word documents linked together by a giant desktop full of broken shortcuts. In this world I do not think the WWW would have caught on….we would probably still live in a Nielsen world of 1 line CSS files and revolting 90’s design.

Microsoft helpfully gives us help with all of these problems. This is one of the least useful pages ever. It supposedly give you a link to an HTML/CSS validation tool, that not only requires Microsoft’s Visual Studio but also requires changes to registry settings and goodness knows what else. They should have just provided a tutorial on nested tables, colspan and cellpadding and we would be away.