May Contain Nuts

So apparently an email marketing software development firm decided to directly address Microsoft’s woefully inadequate treatment of HTML email in Outlook 2007 and the impending 2010 by starting a Twitter campaign. Microsoft responded by basically saying that Word is the most awesome HTML email composition tool on the planet, that “there is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability” (WTF?), and that since the whole thing was cooked up by an email marketing software company anyway, both the Twitter campaign and the Email Standards Project of which they are a major backer were worthy of complete and utter disdain (because ignoring and/or deriding third party developers is totally the way to win hearts and minds). If an email marketing tool developer can’t be trusted to lead a discussion on email standards because of their vested interest in the outcome, why should we listen to anything Microsoft says about computers?

Is it just me, or is Microsoft actively getting into the business of pissing off the people who develop tools and software for their platform? First they spend years ignoring the sorry state of the web that IE6 has left developers to deal with, put out a half-assed, still-busted update with Internet Explorer 7, and 3 years later followed it up with CSS 2.1 compliance and large amounts of mockery and derision towards CSS 3, HTML 5, ACID3, and the JavaScript performance race. Now they’re actively ignoring the fact that Outlook 2007 and 2010 display HTML emails worse than the ten-year-old Outlook 2000 by putting on a song and dance about the ability to use SmartArt and other Word capabilities when composing email.

In essence, Microsoft is completely missing the point of the Fix Outlook campaign. Web and desktop app developers trying to meet client demands for consistent branding in email communications are clamoring for improvements from Microsoft on the email rendering capabilities of Outlook. Microsoft on the other hand is trumpeting the capabilities of Word as an HTML email composer, and looking detached from reality in the process (“the best e-mail authoring experience around” is hardly the expression I would use to describe Word, especially when it comes to creating HTML).

Now, I know a lot of folks have really nasty things to say about HTML in email. For the most part, I agree, heavy HTML content isn’t something email should be used for. In particular, Apple’s stationary stuff in Mail is rather over-the-top (though its complexity does make Mail a best-in-show client for pretty much all HTML email handling, so that’s a plus). However, major corporations like banks and online retailers like to make use of HTML email because of the ability it provides to create visually pleasing, distinct messages with richer capabilities (ever gotten a shipping notice from NewEgg? The order info and tracking link are there courtesy of HTML, and it’s a lot easier to read and generate than tab-delimited plain-text “tables”) and branding that is consistent with the rest of their web presence. Non-profits and small businesses are replacing paper-based communications with email newsletters to save money. It’s these companies and organizations, and the developers who serve them, that Microsoft is not only ignoring, but being openly hostile toward by pig-headedly focusing on Word integration over standards-compliance.

And on the subject of Word’s advanced compositional features being built into Outlook, when was the last time anyone used Outlook directly for stuff like SmartArt etc.? Most people in the corporate world are application-oriented enough that I don’t think it even occurs to them that Outlook supports building complicated graphs and charts. These folks are going to do it in Word and attach it to a rich-text email because that’s their workflow. Anyone not in the corporate world is almost certainly not going to take advantage of the Word feature integration in Outlook, because really, who the hell would use it, and what the hell would they use it for? The whole thing seems like an effort on Microsoft’s behalf to further their vendor lock-in (since non-Outlook clients will almost certainly vomit all over Word’s fancy-schmancy complicated and completely non-standard HTML) and put an extra feature bullet on the back of the Office box.

I think the most mind-boggling part of Microsoft’s anti-standards screed is the argument that using IE to render HTML content is a major security risk. If that’s the case, the Trident engine still has a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the world, then. If disabling JavaScript execution, ActiveX loading, and defaulting image loading to “off” is something that the Trident control isn’t capable of supporting, the IE team loses even more points for not providing a powerful, flexible, and most importantly, secure tool for other developers to build into their applications. The Office team is making the IE team look incredibly lazy and unconcerned with security by making such a claim. Either it’s true, or the Office team is just really lazy and more interested in their marketing bullshit. Whichever it is, someone at MS is still apparently not on-board the secure and open standards movement that’s supposedly been sweeping the Redmond campus the past few years.

I guess all of this could be rendered moot if Word were able to generate and interpret standards-based HTML. Of course, this will happen the day that pigs fly and the Earth falls into the Sun, because Microsoft doesn’t give a rat’s ass about HTML compliance in Word. It “works”, and there’s no sense breaking something that “works”. If this requires another 5+ year campaign like what it took to get IE’s creaking, bloated carcass moving forward again, it’s going to be a cold day in Hell before I can use background-image in an email and have it appear correctly in Outlook.

Can we finally abandon the myth that Microsoft looks after its developers? Or that Microsoft is on the cutting edge of the web development platform? Or that Microsoft cares about standards? Because they don’t, they aren’t, and they most definitely have a vested interest in ignoring them.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.