Designisms

I received an email in my inbox this morning from Campaign Monitor, the email marketing software company, regarding Outlook 2010. It explained that Microsoft has decided to use the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010. What exactly does this mean and how does it affect web designers?

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position and no background images. Not to mention the long list of bugs and quirks that break the simplest of layouts.

Some people might be asking, “what’s the big deal?” The problem is that it’s been a long road to get to where we are now. There are web standards that apply to email as well and Outlook 2010 would be abandoning these accepted standards. The Email Standards Project has written about the specific problems with the beta version of Outlook 2010 in their post, “Microsoft to ignore web standards in Outlook 2010 – enough is enough.”

In response, The Email Standards Project and Campaign Monitor have created FixOutlook.org. The site will serve as a call to action and they have chosen Twitter as the medium for your voice to be heard.

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft have confirmed they want to hear your feedback on this decision. It’s time for the email marketing and design community to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.

What’s the best way to do that? Twitter of course.

If you feel strongly about this matter, join myself on Twitter in voicing your opinion to Microsoft.

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