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Comment by pling | Hacker News Reader

Its shit at those things as well. Months of VSTO and Outlook forms will make you realise it's a pile of crap.

I believe Outlook is still using Word to render HTML content in emails as well.

Which is ridiculous but strikes me to be done so as to ensure that emails prepared in MS Word render correctly in Outlook?

Of course they could fix MS Word's HTML output and fix Outlook to use MSIE's rendering engine ... but that'd only reduce lockin by allowing Outlook users emails to be read properly in other MUA. Never going to happen.

What is funny is that Word 2013 can be configured to generate pages that even MS's own IE10 won't render properly by default.

HTML content in emails is the real WTF. I wonder why no-one ever invented a nice markup format for email? Probably because the only type of person qualified to do that wouldn't be seen dead sending non-plain-text email.

Like text/enriched[0]? Though I guess it might not count as "nice"

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text

The compose window of Outlook is WinWord. Outlook (up to 2003) used Trident (Internet Explorer engine) to show HTML-mails. Nowadays Outlook HTML view is powered by Word layout engine as well (for security reasons, as MS said). It cannot handle many CSS style elements, background color and is stuck with HTML 4.

The compose window of Outlook is WinWord.

I believe up to 2003 this was an option that was not enabled by default too.

Outlook 97-2013 use Word for the compose window. It's not an option, it's how it works behind the scene (Win32 COM components).

e.g. an known Outlook 2010 bug (with Exchange 2013) crash the Outlook client on startup. But you can still open *.msg files, it opens the mail in a window and one can edit the mail.

It's all about Bill Gates vision "information at your fingertips" from the early nineties and the Cairo operating system.

Watch this video from Bill Gates Comdex '90: http://youtu.be/kL8zoQVJaD8?t=19m26s

Cairo '91-'96: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_operating_system

Outlook 97-2003 has it as an option, 2007+ don't. And BTW the Outlook 97-2003 and 2007+ implementations of this feature are different too (MS split most of Word into wwlib.dll in Word 2007).

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