On: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers

[dschobel]

That was it, thanks for the clarification.

I still can't believe they're maintaining two distinct HTML renderers...

[Legion → dschobel]

Describing what the Word engine does with HTML as "rendering" is probably being charitable.

[stingraycharles → Legion]

Well, if Outlook uses the Word rendering engine, then at least it's somewhat decent, looking at some HTML formatted emails that fill my inbox.

[DougBTX → stingraycharles]

This is a good point, but having just designed an HTML formatted email don't discount the fact that Outlook is popular enough to gain bend-over-backwards-to-make-it-work status. Having said that, it wasn't too difficult to get it looking good.

[stilist → stingraycharles]

Only because a lot of HTML email is tested to make sure it’ll appear at least somewhat as expected in Outlook.

[wmf → dschobel]

Considering the politics of such a large company, they're lucky if they only have two.

[pohl → wmf]

You'd be right about that. There's another one in the Media Center division, and it happens to be much more strict with respect to standards, although perhaps not as full-featured.

[etherealG → pohl]

mind elaborating on this? I'd love to hear about it.

[pohl → etherealG]

A friend and former colleague used to work there. He was pretty parsimonious with the details, unfortunately.

[blasdel → dschobel]

There's at least 4 independent codebases — modern IE (which includes 3+ renderers), MS Word, archaic Mobile IE, and the new IE6-based Mobile IE they have in development.