Microsoft published two articles describing the support for HTML and CSS in Outlook 2007. The news isn’t good. Instead of using Internet Explorer 7 to render Outlook 2007 emails, Microsoft decided to switch to the Word 2007 engine:

“Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses the HTML parsing and rendering engine from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to display HTML message bodies. The same HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) support available in Word 2007 is available in Outlook 2007.”

What does this mean for your nicely crated HTML/CSS emails? In short:

• no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
• no support for forms
• no support for plugins
• no support for CSS floats
• no support for CSS positioning
• no support for animated GIFs

Plan on making your HTML and CSS formated emails more basic than they already are, for a much lower common denominator just entered the mix.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 10:07 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.