I am a Web Designer

Not so long ago, Microsoft let the web design community know about its commitment to ensuring that Internet Explorer, the most used web browser in the world, was to be redeveloped at long last to make it adhere to web standards and thus render web pages properly. Of course, this news was greeted with delight, hope and to some extent scepticism by the web design community at large. Micro$oft even recruited the likes of Molly Holtzschlag, a long standing and influential web standards advocate. So all seemed rosy and Microsoft appeared sincere. IE7 was introduced a full five years after IE6, after Firefox and Opera had shown the world how to make a web browser functional, extendable and fully standards compliant. IE7 did indeed provide much better support for CSS 2.1 than its predecessor, but still, alas, woefully under achieved.

It appeared at the time that Microsoft was learning its lesson from the failings of IE6 and appreciated that although a massive improvement, IE7 was still not the standards compliant browser that the web design world were hoping for. So they set about IE8. Again, it appeared that there was a transparency to Microsoft’s development process and the web community at large were encourage to supply their thoughts on what was needed in a modern browser. Microsoft seemed to care about web standards and web accessibility and for the first time in many many years, the web community dared to get excited by the promise of a new Internet Explorer Browser.

Microsoft’s commitment to web standards was thrown into doubt when they announced that the new IE8 would not have its compatibility mode turned on by default. Instead, designers would have to enter extra code in order to allow their websites to be rendered correctly in this new browser. This is completely contrary to the aims of the web standards project, which looks to reduce html code where possible for faster rendering, clearer reading for machines and less clutter for screen readers. The thought of a web standards compliant capable web browser not rendering web sites in compliance mode was greeted with incredulity by the web design community. Microsoft appeared to be listening and declared that they had removed the feature from their development. This was satisfactory, but was the first glimpse that Microsoft might not have been completely sincere in its devotion to web standards.

It was around this time that Microsoft also announced that Outlook, M$’s email client was to use the MSWord rendering engine to display its HTML emails. Previously, html emails would have been rendered using the Internet Explorer engine and it was assumed that Outlook emails would benefit from the strides in standards compliance that Microsoft was making with IE8. So this was a bit of a bombshell. MSWord’s html rendering engine has practically no standards compliance or CSS 2.1 support and in one simple action Microsoft showed the web design community that it had no interest in Web Standards, Web Accessibility or anything other than itself.

Today, this (old) news has been reawakened as a twitter campaign. A huge anti-Microsoft following is evident in the number of tweets that have been posted to the fixoutlook cause. To show your support, head to http://fixoutlook.org where you’ll be encouraged to tweet: Uncool. @msofficeus is using Word to render emails in Outlook, killing standards support. See http://fixoutlook.org and RT