Microsoft have announced that Outlook 2010 will use the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails (as does Outlook 2007). In response The Email Standards Project have launched a campaign to send a clear message to Microsoft: Outlook’s broken – Lets fix it.

Perhaps it is common knowledge, but until today I was unaware that the CSS first-child pseudo-class fails in IE7 when the child element is immediately preceeded by an HTML comment.

Reading though a preview of the HTML 5 specification over at A List Apart, I was somewhat surprised by the names chosen for two new HTML elements: header and footer. Like many other standards aware web designers I have worked hard to train myself out of the habit of naming divs non-semantically, only to discover that HTML 5 will undo all of my good work.

When I started out as a web designer, content management systems belonged strictly to the realm of big budget websites. For everyone else, it was perfectly normal for a web designer to manually update a site whenever a change needed to be made. Clients didn’t expect a CMS to be included with their website, and web designers didn’t offer the option. Times have certainly changed, and in an age of blogs, Facebook, and MySpace, clients expect to be able to take control of their website’s content.

For most web designers, especially those who work solo, a custom built content management system is still a tall order. Fortunately there are numerous commercial and open source content management systems available, which offer a practical and affordable means of wrangling content. However, a “one size fits all” content management system that doesn’t address a site’s specific content requirements can introduce as many problems as it solves.

Recently the web standards debate has taken an interesting turn, with many standards advocates re-evaluating the role of validation in their daily practice. Most recently Ethan Marcotte contributed an article titled Where Our Standards Went Wrong to A List Apart. Marcotte concluded that validation is still a vital part of any web development project, but the fact that the opposite side of the argument was given serious consideration is significant.

It’s a while since I gave any thought to spacer gifs, but I was looking at the Exxon website tonight (as you do on a Tuesday evening) and saw something that made me chuckle. I was viewing the site in Firefox (of course), and noticed that on many pages the text “spacer.gif” appeared prominently within the layout.

Well it looks as if Microsoft has screwed up royally with Outlook 2007, at least insofar as the way HTML emails are rendered. Instead of using the not-too-shabby Internet Explorer 7 rendering engine to display HTML emails, Microsoft opted to use a customized version of the Word 2007 rendering engine. That’s right, from now on your beautifully constructed HTML newsletters are going to be rendered by the crime against layout known as Microsoft Word. That fact alone was enough to send shivers down my spine, but when I dug a little deeper I discovered just how dire the situation really is.

For a long time I was wary of designing email newsletters. I had read how difficult it was to construct an HTML newsletter that displayed as intended in all the popular email clients. I had heard about the horrors of creating layouts using tables. I had been warned about the perils of using CSS. But this year I have had several clients request that I design email newsletters for them, and had no choice but to school myself in the arcane art of HTML email design.

Last week I was putting the finishing touches on a small website I created for a friend. Specifically, I was jazzing up the image gallery with an ‘Image loading…’ animation, so that visitors knew to hang around while a new image loaded. In the process I made an interesting discovery about the way Safari (Safari 1.2 at any rate) handles javascript image source swapping.