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Comment by npilk | Hacker News Reader

Designing complex HTML emails that look the same across all platforms without bugs is a nightmare. On the one hand, it’s easy to say the solution is to keep things simple with plain text or simpler designs. But that also limits the customer experiences you can create in an email.

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That’s because the HTML renderer in Outlook is actually Microsoft Word, which is painfully ridiculous and something only a monopoly could get away with.

Why!??? Doesn’t Microsoft have 10 other HTML renderers they could use?

The official excuse is that those renderers do not include the editing experience they want to provide. But of course Microsoft doesn’t mind that this way they can ignore any standard they want and dictate what features work and what features aren’t available, all without even needing to publish any specification about how it works. The specification is ‘what you see in Outlook is what you get, good luck!’.

I'm as dumbfounded as you, honestly. Even the IE11 engine would be a step-up to be honest.

In other systems, we are still required to use HTML4 Transitional, and Outlook is only part of the problem. Even webmail, which you expect to handle modern HTML, just fails on unexpected ways (no CSS on head, even if it's embedded on the mail, is one of those egregious problems). It's miles better to be the one working on the website than the marketing email.

The two reasons

- if you copy and paste stuff from Office a lot (like Office users tend to do) it's nice that the formatting will be consistent

- being feature-rich can be a bug and not a feature when dealing with marketing emails

It's a lot easier with something like MJML - https://mjml.io/

Don't blindly trust these frameworks, wouldn't want your customers' Outlook to crash when they open your invoice.

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