The recent announcement is that Outlook 2010, like Outlook 2007, will use Microsoft Word for it’s rendering engine. No…you read that right…Word’s rendering engine. A rendering engine that doesn’t support simple CSS statements like float, width or height. Here’s their stance on why they’re opting to use the Word rendering engine again:

We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages.
William Kennedy
Corporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms Team

Now I understand their desire to allow their users to create “visually stunning” emails easily. However, the side effect of their current method of enabling that is that they force anyone creating HTML emails to tailor to their poor support of current HTML and CSS standards. Unfortunately, the team behind Outlook apparently doesn’t think these standards apply to email. They claim that there is “no widely-supported consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability.” Really?

In response to their announcement, fixoutlook.org was set up and encouraged Twitter users to retweet in protest of the decision. At the time of their statement, over 20,000 people had tweeted the message. I understand that Twitter users are only a subset of the people who will be using and developing for Outlook 2010, but still….how can 20,000 people, many of whom are developers and designers who work with these technologies daily, not demonstrate some sort of consensus? Even if not, wouldn’t the logical move be to try to support as much of the HTML and CSS standards as possible?

In the meantime, this really sends an inconsistent message about Microsoft’s willingness to play nicely with others. While the IE8 team made a commitment to improving their standards support significantly, the team behind Outlook 2010 is ignoring them and is forcing everyone else to make the effort to play along with them, making it very difficult for innovation across the board.

If you’re on Twitter, head over to fixoutlook.org and be sure to add your name to the list of people who realize how bad of an idea this is. If you’re not on Twitter, how about telling the Outlook team your thoughts on their article defending their choice to use the Word rendering engine. Let’s find out how many people equal a consensus.

More Information

• The Email Standards Project original call to action
• Jeffrey Zeldman’s thoughts
• Outlook’s Response to the Protest

Oomph, much like Operator in Firefox, pulls microformatted information from a page and allows the user to make use of this data by offering options like being able to export contact information, map addresses, and add events to your calendar.

That would be enough in itself to get my attention…Microsoft has not typically been the most open of companies, and despite Gates’ declaration that the web needs Microformats, they really hadn’t done much to advance its’ use. Seeing their developer community get behind Microformats with the toolbar and a couple of nice Microformats articles is very encouraging.

However, there’s more to this story. In addition to the IE toolbar, a cross-browser Javascript implementation of Oomph was created. The toolkit, which makes use of JQuery, provides the same functionality of Oomph no matter the browser being utilized.

What’s so wonderful about the way the Oomph toolkit functions is that the useful data is all right there in the browser window. Without the visitor leaving the site, they can grab a vcard of your contact information, see a listing of upcoming events, or make use of Visual Earth and view a map of a location.

This is, I think, a fairly major move. The beauty of Microformats is how easy it is to make your content more meaningful, and more useful. By providing similar data in a specific format, it significantly decreases the effort necessary to extract that data, and then use it. Having a cross-browser implementation of a script that makes use of this data to enhance its’ functionality is really a nice feature and a great way to show off the value of using Microformats.

What’s best is that since the toolkit makes use of Javascript and CSS for the effects and layout, we can modify the functionality and appearance for usage on our own sites. Technorati already offered services to help us extract contact information or event information, but the Oomph toolkit expands upon that functionality and allows us to offer even more enhanced options for visitors.

All in all, I am very pleased by this development. Microformats is such a valuable technology that is long overdue for mainstream implementation. It’s nice to see yet another big supporter coming through to help it get there. Along with Technorati’s tools and the fantastic Optimus Microformats transformer by Dmitry Baranovskiy, the resouces are in place and it should be interesting to see the ways these tools are utilized to provide a better user experience for visitors.

For those of you who may be unaware, Acid 2 is a test page for web browser vendors set up by the Web Standards Project (WASP). The intention was for the Acid 2 test to be a tool for browser vendors to use to make sure their browsers could handle some features that we as web developers would love to use. It’s a pretty intense little test. If your curious, the WASP walks you through each of the items that Acid 2 tests for.

The timing for Microsoft couldn’t have been any better. This announcement comes right after Opera announced they were filing a complaint against Microsoft for their lack of standards compliance.

Now just because a browser actually passes the test doesn’t guarantee it will be standards compliant, but this is most definitely a step in the right direction. Add to this the rumor going around that hasLayout will be taken care of now in IE8, and I must say I am getting a little excited here. Of course, with the beta version coming out in the first half of 2008, it will still be quite some time before IE8 takes over the market share currently owned by other versions of the browser. Heck, IE7 still hasn’t passed IE6 as the dominant Microsoft browser.

Not to be outdone, BetaNews claims that Firefox 3 Beta also successfully passed the Acid 2 Test. Looks like we may have a pretty intense battle for browser supremacy starting up here in the new year.