Outlook 2007 and Email Campaigns - back to the dark ages...

We were recently testing an email newsletter and realized that the layout wasn't coming through properly in Outlook 2007. "Huh", we said..."it looks fine in Outlook 2003". Well apparently in Redmond, 4 years doesn't always mean 4 years of forward progress. It turns out that Outlook 2007 has some notable differences in how it handles Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). Because of web based email clients like Hotmail, it has been our practice for a while now to put all styles inline; rather than creating style rules that live elsewhere on the page and are then accessed by HTML elements, all style information is instead applied directly to those elements. This is extremely redundant, however it gets the job done and ultimately still makes use of (many of) the benefits of CSS. Its a coding concession we are willing to make in the interests of consistency across multiple platforms and email readers.

However, Outlook 2007 downgrades the list of CSS attributes that are understood. For example, "float", which will push an elements to the left or right or other elements next to it, is no longer supported. Background images and related attributes are no longer supported, nor are attributes that enable us to manipulate the appearance of unordered and ordered lists.

In short, we as coders need to take a step back and start coding these communications much the way we coded HTML 5 years ago - which is ironically just before Outlook 2003 was released. We need to start writing code that, if it weren't for a good business reason, would be downright embarrassing and antiquated. Hey Microsoft - get with it (seriously though - looks like the CSS issues were a byproduct of using the MS Word rendering engine in Outlook 2007).

There are some excellent tabular summaries of the differences between various email clients over at Campaign Monitor. You can also find an explanation on why the change occurred here.

The Bottom Line
The net result of all of this, if you create email newsletters or if you have them created for you, is that this is an important new development, and all your existing email newsletter templates and code should be scrubbed and re-evaluated in light of these regressions.

Scratching the Surface of the Web

Over the years, as Microsoft has risen to its present market dominance, its profit has come from tidal surge product updates versus the sort of innovation we've come to expect from the likes of Apple. But when you have the dollars and the sheer warm bodies that Microsoft has, sometimes the bleeding edge is brought to surface, as it was last month with the announcement of "Surface"--the surface computing platform that allows users to use their hands to manipulate screen objects.



As an aside, the product design reminds one of the "cocktail" video game consoles in the 1980s for Centipede, Asteroids and Ms. Pacman, which you found in neighborhood Pizza Huts. Take away the joysticks and big buttons, and that's about what Surface looks like, minus the repetitive fun.



Without passing any sort of pro or con judgement of the technology, the hype and the marketing hoohah, my thoughts are on implications for web site design. Assuming that the paradigm becomes less about clicking links and more manipulating things in a more natural way, does a "web site" even make sense in the not-too-distant future? Isn't a web page nothing more than a contrivance born of not having better tools? In the Surface world, doesn't information design start to resemble something like product design or interior design? How do we design for this? What is this, exactly? What are the technical and educational skills we need to cultivate now?

Like so many technological things, we ever feel that we are at the surface--perhaps now more than ever...at least for our industry.

I Google I Misanthrope

I was reading through some whitepapers from Enquiro yesterday. They're the folks who have done extensive research into how users perceive and use search engines. They've heat mapped how folks perceive a search results page and done extensive lab studies on the complex nature of search engine usage. Anyway, one interesting conclusion is that "We found that Google has created an inherent contradiction between their mission and their business model that results in a interesting dynamic with their users. " (that's from "Inside the Mind of the Searcher" by Gord Hotchkiss)

The thinking behind this is that Google has purposefully created a sharp visual distinction between the organic results and the paid ("sponsored") results by placing the paid links in areas commonly used for advertising and treating them different visually. This 'honesty' to its users has helped develop a loyal Googlerati. However, the types of users who value this honesty typically ignore and distrust paid listings - and don't click on them.

It will be interesting to watch Google's continuing effort to build a subscriber base of distrustful misanthropes like me.