Comments on: Design tools for the open web: reflections on the fixoutlook campaign

By: Links 26/06/2009: More Free Software for Austria, Germany, and Italy | Boycott Novell

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:34:01 +0000

[...] Design tools for the open web: reflections on the fixoutlook campaign The twittersphere is abuzz with the current twitterstorm about Microsoft’s plan to use the “Word HTML engine” in the next version of Outlook. It’s a campaign that’s an organization which represents people whose living depends on their ability to make compelling HTML pages in email, so it’s not surprising that they have a beautiful site which is getting a lot of people to retweet. [...]

By: Christophe

Christophe — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:40:21 +0000

Hello David,

Very nice article, raising the good questions.

I think you should contact Daniel Glazmann from Disruptive Innovations and member of W3C. He has designed blue griffon wich tend to simplify HTML/CSS based on XUL and Mozilla Technology.

Kind Regards

By: Coder Mike

Coder Mike — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:53:00 +0000

There’s an important issue here – the difference between using Word to _author_ emails and using Word to _display_ emails.

All the Word tools used to _author_ emails are fine – their output is being converted to html anyway. The problem is using Word code to _display_ the emails – Outlook takes well-coded emails, chews them up, and spits them out looking like the mail your dog chewed on.

All email authors and web developers want is standard display of HTML on the web and in email. This will make newsletters easier to create and more likely to be displayed the way their creators intended AND the way subscribers wanted them to look when they signed up in the first place.

By: Toe

Toe — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:05:01 +0000

There’s the rub — good HTML engines aren’t useful in a user context like Outlook’s if the authoring tools weren’t built with real HTML/CSS in mind. And neither Word’s venerable composition tools or Silverlight’s new-fangled ones were.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Microsoft’s Expression Web *is* an authoring tool built with real HTML/CSS in mind. Is there anything stopping them from using something based on that?

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:31:15 +0000

Great post, David. Of course, all this will be moot when Google Wave and HTML5 goodness replaces email, right?

By: Cedric

Cedric — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:35:29 +0000

@who You woundn’t say that if you were a developer and needed to talcke with outlook creating your emails.

Not all html emails are spam, did you think about all the newsletter that needs to be created every day??

By: Who

Who — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:59:38 +0000

Awesome post.
I agree, most users don’t care. And the majority of the people (myself included) who posted to twitter don’t use Outlook, or have never run into an issue where they realized they had this problem.

Sure, most my spam and newsletters won’t look “amazing”, but 99% of my e-mail (even with HTML) will look perfectly fine in both Thunderbird and Outlook. Really this is all about marketers wanting to get their way.

Once consumer authoring tools for rich HTML get better, then the rendering engines need to get better as well. Until then, having a super compliant engine like Gecko, Webkit, etc. only matters for the super low percentage (newsletters and spam) of e-mails that users actually care about. Even worse, this only matters for e-mails that are created OUTSIDE of e-mail clients. As you point out, there isn’t one good or popular “e-mail client” out there that allows users to author e-mail with all the advanced tools these people are complaining about.

I do have to give Ben Richardson and David Greiner credit for making one hell of an amazing marketing page for their product and other marketers.

By: buzz

buzz — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:48:24 +0000

Design tools for the open web: reflections on the fixoutlook campaign @ david ascher…

This is a hard task, because it’s about designing design tools, which combines psychological, social, product design, usability, and technical challenges. It’s a worthy task, though, and one that I’d love to see someone tackle, especially if we can get…

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:10:52 +0000

An exceptionally good article in which you’ve raised a lot of good points! Loved the read

By: Philip Hofstetter

Philip Hofstetter — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:15:47 +0000

You seem to have gotten the history a bit mixed up: Until Office 2007, Outlook was indeed using Internet Explorer. This, while not being the optimum, at least allowed designers of HTML mail newsletters and stuff to use technologies like CSS.

With Office 2007, MS decided to remove the IE dependency and use Word for the rendering of HTML emails.

In one single blow, this brought us back to the stone age that were font-tags and tables.

The reasoning behind this switch is unclear to me, but it ranges from security (IE’s security problems are well-known), UI integration (Word does have the ribbon interface, their own custom editor didn’t, so by using word, they saved themselves some work), versioning problems (most of the users at the release of Office 2007 were using IE6, some of them IE7 – probably it was too hard to make Outlook worth with both versions – and what about updates?)

This just as an information for your readers.