> "As you can see, by going with the 'technical debt by default' approach, we ended up in a scenario whereby if you create a brand-new webpage today, run it in the local intranet zone, and don't add any additional markup, you will end up using a 1999 implementation of web standards by default. Yikes."
Meanwhile, Outlook and Windows Mail are even worse than this, using the MSO renderer and editor (essentially: Word) in all versions except Outlook 2003 (in which version they switched to the IE renderer and editor, but then regressed to MSO in the next release for terrible reasons).
That MSO menace is unconditionally stuck in a buggy and incomplete implementation of 1997 web standards. (As an outsider, I say that it appears to have been treated entirely as a black box for the last two decades; I am aware of no changes beyond supporting high-DPI displays, if you wish to count that.)
And this is what they are still actively advocating for email.
I wish they would apply this same reasoning to the MSO renderer. I hate it and the decision to go back to it in Outlook 2007 with a passion exceeded by little in the tech industry. With it they have singlehandedly manufactured jobs for tens, nay, hundreds of thousands of software developers and hacks, and held back the entire email space with their stranglehold by at least a decade. It’s that bad.
One upside to that is people don't try to get too fancy with HTML emails. IMO, email would be much better off if it had never supported HTML. Things are getting worse with the current trend of supporting emoji in the subject. My gmail web inbox looks like a GeoCities page.
Meanwhile, Outlook and Windows Mail are even worse than this, using the MSO renderer and editor (essentially: Word) in all versions except Outlook 2003 (in which version they switched to the IE renderer and editor, but then regressed to MSO in the next release for terrible reasons).
That MSO menace is unconditionally stuck in a buggy and incomplete implementation of 1997 web standards. (As an outsider, I say that it appears to have been treated entirely as a black box for the last two decades; I am aware of no changes beyond supporting high-DPI displays, if you wish to count that.)
And this is what they are still actively advocating for email.
I wish they would apply this same reasoning to the MSO renderer. I hate it and the decision to go back to it in Outlook 2007 with a passion exceeded by little in the tech industry. With it they have singlehandedly manufactured jobs for tens, nay, hundreds of thousands of software developers and hacks, and held back the entire email space with their stranglehold by at least a decade. It’s that bad.