<div style="width: 600px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">
TEST
</div>

</rant>

"The Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 HTML and CSS Validator tool helps you to validate HTML and CSS grammar using some of the most popular Web developing tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, Microsoft Expression Web, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Macromedia Dreamweaver 8."

I can't believe how much frustration and headache Microsoft continues to cause their customer base when they introduce new versions of their software, "claiming" to improve upon things when they only land themselves deeper into a hole of hated dug by these same customers. You've wasted us thousands of hours of time in time that we'll never get back in failed attempts to make what looks PERFECT by HTML standards absolultely horrible, like it was thrown in a blender, turned on high for 30 seconds, and called "WORD HTML".

GET RID OF IT!

Word HTML is by far the WORST, most NON-STANDARDS complain attempt at HTML in the development realm today. Wake up and look at the feedback from your customers and partners, like myself.

I have several templates created using this spec. (The spec was helpful thank you.)
http://commadot.com/the-holy-mail/
http://commadot.com/cross-client-html-email-v2/
http://commadot.com/email-best-practices/

I have noticed a very specific problem. (Blogged: http://commadot.com/outlook-to-gmail-formatting-annoyance/)
The problem is that an image used like this:
&lt;img src="http://www.site.com/images/foo.gif"&gt;
gets rendered like this:
&lt;p class="msoNormal"&gt;&lt;img src="cid:23490234"&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

I don't care about the image being embedded. What freaks me out is the &lt;P&gt; tag! It's creating artificial margins above all the images. This sucks. Gmail strips CSS classes so the class is useless. Even purely from Outlook-to-Outlook this gets messed up.

I need to figure out a way to make the &lt;P&gt; tag constrained in height regardless of its margins. What options do I have? Could someone from Microsoft please explain why you are making my life a living ***?

Thanks, Glen Lipka

  
Esther Fan, MSFT: Thank you for your feedback. Please submit this to Microsoft Connect or the forums so that it can be reviewed and addressed by the product team.
Microsoft Connect: http://connect.microsoft.com
MSDN Forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories

Now I understand why Microsoft is so afraid of Linux and the world of open source. The alternatives to Microsoft just got a whole lot more attractive...

After spending almost a week trying to un-css my e-mails I'm giving up and telling people to use Thunderbird instead if they want to read my messages. Oh but that's right, Thunderbird doesn't work reliably with Microsoft Exchange because Microsoft didn't bother to implement IMAP properly...

Esther Fan, MSFT: Thank you for your feedback. Please submit this to Microsoft Connect or the forums so that it can be reviewed and addressed by the product team.
Microsoft Connect: http://connect.microsoft.com
MSDN Forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories

<p class="editorial important first"></p>

p.editorial {
    font-family:'Times New Roman';
}

p.important {
    border: 1px red solid;
}

p.first {
    font-weight:bold;
}

Outlook and Word do not recognise this however (I presume they naïvely assume that class can only have one value) and will only apply the styles relating to the initial class name listed in the attribute (in this case "editorial").

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.2

Esther Fan, MSFT: Thank you for your feedback. Please submit this to Microsoft Connect or the forums so that it can be reviewed and addressed by the product team.
Microsoft Connect: http://connect.microsoft.com
MSDN Forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories

The WHOLE point of HTML email is that it renders the SAME as browser content. There is no more risk opening an email than opening a web page so WHAT WERE YOU THINKING.

The CEO of our company is ALREADY leaning toward open source, do you REALLY have to HELP HIM!!!

This is the worst idea coming out of MS since Vista.

It is not too late to fix this..... can you say SERVICE PACK !!!!

Esther Fan, MSFT: Thank you for your feedback. Please submit this to Microsoft Connect or the forums so that it can be reviewed and addressed by the product team.
Microsoft Connect: http://connect.microsoft.com
MSDN Forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories

What is the point?

I have a wonderful HTML signature which used W3C Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS2 to recreate our company logo without using a picture. It even displays the same in both IE and firefox. Of course since Word doesnt support DIV positioning or floats it will no longer work in outlook, which we all use.

Why take such an enormous step backwards instead of fixing the HTML incompatibility in Word? You have alienated a huge number of users to please just a few. Newsflash - Most users are not interested in using Word to create email signatures, due to the enormous bloat.

Most annoyed, at this non sensical approach.

I'm just adding my name to the list of disgruntled companies on this page. Leaving out GIF animation is utterly incompetent and inexcuseable. Quoting from your knowledge base (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320314) :

<quote>
Advantages:

• GIF is a widely supported Internet standard.
• Lossless compression and transparency are supported.
• Animated GIFs are prevalent and easy to create with many GIF animation programs.

</quote>

We look forward to the patch release coming out soon. Meanwhile we suffer the cost of re-coding *all* our subscriber email newsletter templates to be compatible with Outlook 2007, and re-drawing all our gifs.

Why does this article claims that Outlook 2007 support margins, without any sidenote about margin around images?
Same goes for alignments of images. You can align images, but then you loose the surrounding style, unless you repeat it again....

Anyway, to me it's *** and impossible to automaticly produce high quality newsletters who will look good in Outlook 2007.

Why Microsoft? Why?

What I'd honestly like to see is some sort of article that states a few things. What it's not going to state is what Outlook/Word 2007 DOES support, and what it CAN do, but why it CAN'T seem to do something that nearly every other modern email client CAN. It's going to state why you guys decided NOT to go down the road of standards, and why you guys decided to make it extremely hard on developers/designers like myself. And then...it's going to state a solution. A patch, a REALLY BIG patch, along with an apology for not taking your stance as a leader in the technical industry seriously.

Free browsers can manage to do what MS can't, and that's get things right. And that's when I just have to ask: Were you just not thinking? Is there ANY reason at all that this had to happen like this?

BTW, I'm running Vista, and think that you guys have the potential to put out a product that EVERYONE will be pleased with (and a huge advantage over Apple with your market share). I have had minimal problems with Vista, and none of them being MS's fault. I've got to admit that the UAC is annoying, but I can deal with changing a setting or two.

Let's have a look at the options for HTML rendering: a) a web browser, b) a word processor. Hands up if you choose 'b'...

...looks like you're the only one in the room with your hand up, MS. Good job.

Here is a good place page that you (Microsoft Developers) should go check out.

http://www.molly.com/2007/01/18/what-happened-with-html-and-css-in-outlook-2007/

This is not a small problem and is now affecting business that support your products. I'm really hoping that you come up with a fix for this. If not you are just pushing people into using web based e-mail. All of which support HTML and CSS in the e-mails.

PLEASE fix this problem!

Dear Developers,

I have heard and read about the limitations you have implemented within office 2007.

This new code-limitations to MS Outlook will have big negative impact within the creation and publication of e-mail advert campaigns.

As you know by today most of the e-mail promotional campaigns contain various visual elements. The new unsupported HTML tags as TABLES and BACKGROUND-IMAGES are essential tools within the "already very limited" capabilities of the existing e-mail clients.

With this new changes you are:

1. stopping an important established standard and support of the Outlook e-mail client.

2. Contributing to unnessesary confussion and problems within preestablished standards.


Outlook is an important and established communication tool within different branches world wide.
In this sense cutting down its features won't make it much attractive and compatible to anyone.

Please be aware of all concequences involved within this limitations.
I therefore expressevely request to remove this limitations which are not needed.

Thanks a lot for considering this request and critic.

Kind Regards

M.G.
Switzerland