Jan 25

Written by: host
Thursday, January 25, 2007

There are some upcoming gotcha's if you're in the business of authoring your emails in html format. This might just involve your personal email, or might also affect emails composed in outside services that are broadcast to a mass audience and/or newsletter subscription list.

The basics are that Outlook 2007, in use by the majority of both email composers and email readers, is abandoning Internet Explorer as its rendering engine. Instead, it will use the crippled Microsoft Word rendering engine.

You need to pay attention because just as Internet Explorer has majority share of internet browsers, likewise does Outlook have majority share of email readers.

And there lies the problem. Because the newest version of Outlook has changed the rendering engine, the following features won't be supported:

• No background images in div's or table cells
• Inability to apply a background color to a nested table cell or nested div
• No support for float or position, sending us back to tables only
• Extremely poor support for padding and margin

So the advice is to step back a bit, and compose for a (lower) lowest common denominator. As you try and target that denominator, Microsoft has issued a tool to that validates how close you come - see here.

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