John On Web Stuff » microsoft

What’s wrong with Outlook? – Tatham Oddie

John — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 02:12:10 +0000

It has been an interesting few weeks in the world of web standards for email. The boys from Campaign Monitor executed a successful awareness campaign in the form of fixoutlook.org which rapidly racked up over 24,000 Tweets and overtook the Iran Election in Twitter’s trending topics. Unfortunately for all of us, it has been a case of message received – but not understood. via What’s wrong with Outlook? – Tatham Oddie.

I build quite a few emails at work for a variety of clients, and time and time again I have to do some creative image slicing, and then build with nested tables in nested tables in nested tables, etc. just to get emails to work in Outlook 2007.

Building emails should be as easy as building a simple HTML page with some standard HTML and CSS. Since outlook 2007 uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine, email developers are now forced to write bad, bloated code to make sure that emails work correctly. Not only do we need to adjust our code, we need to adjust the designs as well, because guess what, Outlook 2007 (or rather the Microsoft Word rendering engine) has no support for background images.

There is a campaign over at fixoutlook.org – if you’re on Twitter, you can send a tweet to your account from there to help send a message to Microsoft.

Prepare for Automatic Update distribution of IE8

John — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 02:52:08 +0000

Finally, this is what many of us web developers have been waiting for (again). Over the next few weeks and months, Internet Explorer 8 will be pushed out over Automatic Updates/Windows Updates to upgrade users running Internet Explorer 6 or 7.

Oh, and just like Internet Explorer 7, 8 is also available completely free, without the requirement for Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA). This means that everyone running the latest versions of Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003/8 will be able to update!

Starting on or about the third week of April, users still running IE6 or IE7 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Server 2008 will get will get a notification through Automatic Update about IE8. This rollout will start with a narrow audience and expand over time to the entire user base. On Windows XP and Server 2003, the update will be High-Priority. On Windows Vista and Server 2008 it will be Important. via IEBlog : Prepare for Automatic Update distribution of IE8.

TG Daily – Google tells users to drop IE6

John — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:16:02 +0000

Chicago (IL) – Taking a page out of Apple’s book, Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome that, according to the company, run the popular web-based email service “twice as fast.” Google also labels IE6 as an unsupported browser, meaning it fails to run some Gmail features.

TG Daily – Google tells users to drop IE6.

From the Department of Badly Chosen Defaults

John — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:44:13 +0000

Note that all the other browsers use bicubic interpolation for scaling by default, because that’s the only thing that make sense, but IE requires a non-standard CSS extension. So, pictures on this site should be a little smoother for those of you determined to use Internet Explorer.

From the Department of Badly Chosen Defaults – Joel on Software.