{"id":2156,"date":"2009-06-29T14:37:42","date_gmt":"2009-06-29T20:37:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/?p=2156"},"modified":"2009-06-29T14:37:42","modified_gmt":"2009-06-29T20:37:42","slug":"standards-schmandards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/2009\/06\/29\/standards-schmandards\/","title":{"rendered":"Standards, schmandards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When it comes to e-mail, I&#8217;m a plain-text kind of guy. But I know that some businesses prefer to use HTML-formatted e-mail, and thanks to Gwen&#8217;s new job, I&#8217;ve been learning way more than I ever wanted to about this. Long story short, it&#8217;s a nightmare. Avoid.<\/p>\n<p>If you can&#8217;t avoid it (as Gwen cannot), you have to learn to deal with it. It&#8217;s a complicated problem because there are more renderers for HTML e-mail in frequent use than there are web browsers: in addition to client-side e-mail apps like Outlook or Mail.app, there are also web-based clients like Yahoo (which has two separate renderers, depending on whether you&#8217;re using old-and-busted Yahoo mail or new-hotness Yahoo mail), Hotmail, and Gmail.<\/p>\n<p>Each of these has its own peculiarities, most of which can be managed without too much pain, except for one: Outlook 2007. Outlook &#8217;07 actually has a more primitive renderer than Outlook 2003, using the renderer from MS Word instead of the renderer from Internet Exlorer. Word&#8217;s renderer uses a non-compliant mishmash of HTML 2.0 and HTML 3.2, with very limited support for CSS. There has been a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.email-standards.org\">movement<\/a> among people who have to deal with this to get Microsoft to straighten up and fly right. Last week, Microsoft <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/outlook\/archive\/2009\/06\/24\/the-power-of-word-in-outlook.aspx\">promised that they would not<\/a>, provoking considerable <a href=\"http:\/\/www.email-standards.org\/blog\/entry\/microsoft-respond-to-our-call-for-standards-support\/\">gnashing of teeth<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m surprised at Microsoft&#8217;s response. They seemed to generally be moving in the direction of better standards support, if perhaps grudgingly so. While there is a legitimate argument to using Word&#8217;s HTML renderer in Outlook, this strikes me as a situation where they could have their cake and eat it too\u00e2\u20ac\u201din fact, there&#8217;s a recent precedent in Microsoft&#8217;s approach to HTML rendering with the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/ie\/archive\/2008\/08\/27\/introducing-compatibility-view.aspx\">compatibility mode<\/a> in IE8.<\/p>\n<p>It would be nice if the Word HTML renderer and generator were brought into the new millennium to emit and interpret standards-compliant code. It would also be nice if I had a unicorn that farted rainbows.<\/p>\n<p>Short of that, it would be a relatively straightforward expedient for documents designed in Outlook around Word&#8217;s HTML renderer to include a header element like <code>&lt;meta http-equiv=\"X-UA-Compatible\" content=\"Outlook=EmulateWord\" \/&gt;<\/code> or equivalent in order to invoke that renderer, otherwise relying on whatever the current IE renderer is. This would, admittedly, add some overhead to the app, but MS doesn&#8217;t seem to have any aversion to adding overhead to their code.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft, being Microsoft<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[156,160,221,331,405],"class_list":["post-2156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-net-stuff","tag-e-mail","tag-email","tag-html","tag-outlook","tag-standards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}