Some backstory will make things clearer. Outlook 2000 (two versions previous to Outlook 2010) used Internet Explorer to render HTML inside of email. If you crafted some HTML for an email, you could expect it to look exactly the same in Outlook as it did in Internet Explorer. In 2006, Office 2007 was released and instead of using IE for rendering HTML inside of Outlook, Microsoft had changed to using Word. Word has a very very simple (and far from standards compliant) HTML rendering engine in it. So where your nicely crafted HTML email might look great in Outlook 2000, it now looked awful in Outlook 2007 due to Word’s poor HTML support.

Things of the Microsoft front have remained quiet until now. William Kennedy, Corporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms Team (long enough title?), made a post the Office team’s blog explaining that there would be no change to Outlook 2010’s HTML rendering and some reasons why the team chose to stick with Word. It’s all a bunch of bullshit.

We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years.

Why is he bothering to trumpet authoring capabilities when what this is really about is rendering? People craft emails in a lot of different ways, both inside and outside of Outlook. Is it handy that I could type up a nice formatted document with graphics, paste it into Outlook, and have it look the same? Yes, of course. However if Microsoft made Outlook and Word render standards compliant HTML correctly, you could still do that.

Word has always done a great job of displaying the HTML which is commonly found in e-mails around the world. We have always made information available about what HTML we support in Outlook; for example, you can find our latest information for our Office 2007 products here. For e-mail viewing, Word also provides security benefits that are not available in a browser: Word cannot run web script or other active content that may threaten the security and safety of our customers.

This paragraph is wrapped in so much spin that I’m dizzy after reading it. What he’s basically saying is that Word can handle <b>, <i>, <center>, <table>, and that’s about it. Guess what? Standards compliant HTML renderers also do a great job of displaying HTML commonly found in email! Using Word is more secure because it doesn’t run scripts? Bullshit! Thunderbird, which uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, simply turns off scripting in email. Ditto for Apple Mail (uses Webkit). Why can’t you do this with Internet Explorer, Microsoft?

We are focused on creating a great e-mail experience for the end user, and we support any standard that makes this better. To that end, Microsoft welcomes the development of broadly-adopted e-mail standards. We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs, and we believe that Outlook provides a good mix of a rich user experience and solid interoperability with a wide variety of other e-mail programs.

Again, Mr. Kennedy seems to be focused on the authoring experience when this is more about rendering. On top of that, it assumes that everyone uses Microsoft products inside of a Microsoft environment. News flash; even people who live exclusively inside the Microsoft universe of products often interact with people who don’t. The words above are trying to say different, but they really aren’t saying anything.

There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability.

Why do we need a consensus specifically for HTML email? HTML already has a standard! Use that! If Mr. Kennedy welcomes these standards, why don’t they try to be proactive about it instead of giving their customers what amounts to a downgrade? Contact this Email Standards Project and strive for a more (for lack of a better term) bi-partisan effort.

The biggest problem here with Outlook using Word’s rendering engine is for people authoring email that is viewed in Outlook. Anyone who is in charge of their company’s email campaigns can attest to the frustration of trying to craft a message that looks good in the most commonly used email clients (it’s not possible to please everyone). It’s especially punctuated by the fact that Microsoft seems to be one of the only ones lagging behind. Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and most webmail clients support much more HTML and CSS in a more standards compliant way than Outlook does. On top of that, Microsoft seems to be denying that there is a problem in the first place. If the thousands of tweets are any indication, there is a problem Microsoft. Step up and join the conversation, work with not only the Email Standards Project, but also others in forming a standard.

This post was inspired by a blog post from: Ben Ward. Some of the arguments he makes I’ve reused here.