Fix Microsoft Outlook’s Broken HTML Rendering
June 26, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
Not sure if you’ve noticed it or not, but Outlook isn’t the most reliable engine for rendering accurate HTML display in your emails. Microsoft Outlook uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine to both create and display HTML in your emails. It’s for this reason that many people believe that Outlook is seriously broken and they’ve started a campaign to fix it.
If you’ve ever done any web development, you’ve probably realized that HTML that’s created by Microsoft Word and the old Microsoft Frontpage application was loaded with a lot of junk.
The folks behind fixoutlook.org are hoping that Microsoft will take the opportunity coming with Office 2010 to step away from the Microsoft Word rendering engine from being used for HTML rendering in Outlook.
Microsoft has stated that they don’t believe Outlook is broken and they will continue to use Word because there are no agreeable standards in how HTML code is to be rendered for email.
What do you think? Is HTML in Outlook broken?
I really hope they do fix it in the next version. I’m surprised it’s taken so long.
Gmail’s is even cruddier than Outlook 2007, even though it’s runs in a web browser. Surprisingly, Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Mail (desktop client) do even a better job than Outlook 2007 or Gmail.
Entourage (Microsoft’s version for Mac) displays HTML just perfectly. So why can’t the Office team for Windows do the same?
I really hope the Office team can beef up the HTML rendering in Outlook. I think it’s rather ridiculous not to.