OMGWTFInternet!: April 2008

As any Web designer like myself—or any other person who creates HTML email—can attest, undoing the problems caused by various email clients can often take longer than actually designing the email itself. After slicing and coding a lovely design, one can spend hours just getting rid of offensive white gaps and style issues caused by inconsistent email rendering from inbox to inbox. Without question, though, Microsoft Outlook 2007 is the worst of the worst. Why? Because it uses Microsoft Word 2007 to render HTML. Microsoft Word. A word processing program. To render HTML.

IF ONLY MICROSOFT HAD AN INTERNET BROWSER TO USE INSTEAD OF A WORD PROCESSOR. Oh wait.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft Word doesn't support, like, 80% of CSS styles one might apply in an email (as this list outlines). Background images? Bye bye. Alt text on images? See ya. "Display" and "float"? Haha, yeah right. What do you think this is, the internet?!

Bottom line: Microsoft doesn't care about the quality of its products, or the users of said products. The 'soft hasn't done anything to address these issues since releasing Outlook 2007 a year-and-a-half ago ... because as far as they're concerned there's nothing to address. Outlook is working exactly as designed.

Join the resistance! Replace your unintelligible Microsoft warez with open source, community-driven programs like Thunderbird and Open Office.

Things I like: