Outlook’s broken—Let’s fix it
fixoutlook.org
fixoutlook.org
They turned to Word for HTML editing/rendering in Outlook 2007 because there was no Internet Explorer team during development. IE7 was released in 2007, but Office 2007 was in development since at least 2003. No IE team means there was no one to send design change requests to. Office doesn't like being at the mercy of other teams, so they break dependencies whenever possible. The lack of an IE team was a perfect example of why this is a successful practice for them.
Word offers a significantly better editing experience and most email clients only render a small subset of standard HTML anyway. Gmail, for example, throws away all headers including CSS. It was a perfectly reasonable cost/benefit trade off for the Outlook team to switch to an editor and renderer they could directly change or influence. There wasn't a big loss of compatability, but there was some. Most HTML email in actual usage renders the same between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 because they would have to be written to the lowest common denominator in order to render correctly in most other mail clients as well.
Outlook 2007 added DRM to emails which, besides being the most annoying thing ever, was a feature highly demanded by customers. This feature is based on Word's DRM.
So, putting on my Microsoft PM hat... let's do a cost benefit analysis of switching Outlook to use the IE8 rendering engine:
Benefits:
1) HTML email authors (who don't pay us anything, by the way) will have a slightly easier time now.
2) HTML email authors will have a significantly easier time in the distant future.
Costs:
1) Second release to break HTML mail compatability in a row.
2) Will need to re-implement DRM. This includes a full battery of security reviews.
3) Will need to re-implement all recent editing improvements.
4) Once again at the mercy of the IE8 team, who already have a huge backlog of work and probably don't care about our DCRs.
shrug Not going to happen in 2010. Probably won't happen in the next release either. When some version of IE supports 100% of all standards and is as fast as a hypothetical future Chrome, such that they have time to deal with the Outlook team, then maaaybe, just maybe they can tackle this... two releases of Office later.... If you're lucky.
This is something that blows my mind. How can we have WYSIWYG editing functionality since the 70's, and when "the web" comes along, we decide to build everything on top of HTML/CSS, which is insanely hard to implement WYSIWYG on top of? Ditto for drag/drop and right click for God's sake.
What is the reason it is so difficult to implement WYSIWYG not top of HTML/CSS (i kind of feal it thinking at latex,but can't put a reason other than "organisation of the source")? on top of which kind of serialisable representation would it be easier, is there any..?
Does the client make sure that you have the rights to view the email I sent to you?
You can then put limits on who can copy, print, fax the email, who can cut/paste from it, to whom you can forward it and force expiry of it.
It includes fun bits such as "The first time that you try to open an e-mail message that uses restricted permission, you must connect to a licensing server to verify your credentials and to download a use license".
Or maybe it is all about feeling important...
Who could possibly ever want to send a link or photo to someone in an email. Everyone should be forced to have green console text on a black background.
Why can't they just use the IE8 rendering engine?
The original MIME specification included an "enriched text" subtype which was essentially an HTML subset that was easy to implement safely and served most purposes for person-to-person communication.
MIME allows absolutely anything to be embedded in an email, but the standard explicitly discourages the use of HTML as the message body. The argument for standard compliant HTML support in all email clients is fairly weak considering it shouldn't be there at all.
A more serious restatement of the joke: Other than HTML email, there is no functional way for the average computer user to send personal information with the following properties:
1. Rich text with embedded images (you know... HTML)
2. available at work without running into firewall or security restrictions (Websense)
3. Easy enough to compete with email.
4. Cheap enough to the end user to compete with email.
5. Secure enough to allay concerns about personal information making it out into the wild. (Never mind that email is easily interceptable: there is a perception versus reality problem here.)
A web application isn't going to do it. It's just too painful to attach more than two photos. A separate application isn't going to do it -- what corporate IT department is going to install it?
Livejournal comes close for tech-savvy people, but it's not in the average user's current skill level.
It's a fundamenally hard problem for social rather than technical reasons, and that is why people use HTML in email, and that is why vendors support it. Reducing it to a technical problem doesn't help.
They certainly don't work better for me, because usually they literally display nothing (since I have disabled loading of remote images).
We have clients that pay thousands of pounds a month for HTML newsletter services (not to us, at the moment). I like to assume they wouldn't be doing this if they didn't work.
(Don't 'they' say that only one person has to click a spam mail for it to be worth sending - is this not more or less the same thing?)
http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2009/06/24/the-power-o...
but that twitter wall looks amazing! Looks like he may have coded it up himself - I know some activist groups would love to have one of those!
I blame Outlook for the mess that E-mail became. Top-posting, citing entire E-mails, people being unable to distinguish cited text from new text, unbroken long line, unreadable and unformatted E-mails.
or Windows Desktop Search 4.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktops...
Or, if you're pragmatic rather than MS locked, and want really fast search, Google Desktop Search.
Or, if you're quite particular and want really really fast search, you can with a bit of fiddling get Lookout to work in Outlook 2007.
But the benefit of using the Outlook builtin search is that it's the same UI all the time. If you're connected to the server it searches on the server, if not it doesn't.
NB: You can be out of the office and connected to the server if you use Outlook/HTTPS as your connection type.
No HTML email abuse, I agree with.
Not giving me the option to put a proper table in an email instead of a hand-drawn ASCII bodge because you're afraid of junk mail, I don't agree with.