(continuation of article here: “Designing for Web Emails”) Outlook Access for Web (OWA) merited a completely new post, as it behaves differently on PCs than Macs. I took three screen shots of the same, consistent template sent to the same account, accessed by PC and Mac, and via Firefox and IE 6.0.
Mac & Firefox
Mac OS X and Firefox 2
Images blocked:
Images loaded:
On Firefox & the Mac, the images are blocked and CSS blocked. When loaded into the email post window, the CSS is still blocked and does not render. Note: the user can link out to a web page to view the rendered message perfectly. I believe this is a way of “securing insecure content”. See below for how this works on a PC and in a more native environment.
PC & IE
On the PC, there is a pop-up box asking if “secure and insecure content” should be loaded. When accepted, the entire message renders well (limited CSS in TD tags, a table, and an external image).
Status on Outlook Compatibilities with HTML and CSS
In January it was all over the news about Microsoft regressing and using Word’s inferior HTML rendering engine The list of incompatibilities, lifted from this SitePoint article by Kevin Yank, are:
* no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
* no support for forms
* no support for Flash, or other plugins
* no support for CSS floats
* no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
* no support for CSS positioning
* no support for animated GIFs
My template doesn’t use any of those elements, so it has proven its durability with OWA. The key to having a template work across all of the webmail browsers is to use the lowest common denominator- and at this point, I believe Gmail has beat out Outlook significantly.
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