HTML emails and CSS formatting will take a huge hit when Outlook 2007 starts taking up positions on millions of desktops, and email newsletter publishers will have to take some extra steps to ensure their creations render correctly. But even that isn't a guarantee against problems with that new email program.
Site Point blog summarized how a lot of publishers are likely to feel:
Not only that, but this new rendering engine isn't any better than that which Outlook previously used-indeed, it's far worse. With this release, Outlook drops from being one of the best clients for HTML email support to the level of Lotus Notes and Eudora, which, in the words of Campaign Monitor's David Grenier, "are serial killers making our email design lives hell."
Microsoft's changes in Outlook 2007 will mean publishers have to validate their code, and craft their publications to suit the listed a sampling of what Outlook 2007 will not support, and David Greiner's post illustrated this by showing how one of their newsletters looks in Outlook 2007 and in Outlook 2000:
No background images - Background images in divs and table cells are gone, meaning Mark's image replacement technique is out the window.
Poor background color support - Give a div or table cell a background color, add some text to it and the background color displays fine. Nest another table or div inside though and the background color vanishes.
No support for float or position - Completely breaking any CSS based layouts right from the word go. Tables only.
Shocking box model support - Very poor support for padding and margin, and you thought IE5 was bad!
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.





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