Microsoft have today announced that in their upcoming release of Office 2010 that they will continue to use Word to render their HTML emails, once again going against the grain of the web community and specially the Email Standards Project.

HTML email is not perfect by any means and in some ways could be compared to website building around 10 years ago at the start of the standards campaign. With the huge range of email clients available it is a difficult task designing an effective HTML email that will display well in the majority of email clients and also degrade well so that the content is still viewable when images are turned off or in a client that only shows only plain text emails, and now with this decision Microsoft are making it even harder for the next five years or so. Microsoft Outlook is a widely used client in business and us designers will have to struggle to ensure support for this client whilst a lot of clients move towards using standards and increasing CSS support in email. With Internet Explorer still being a pain to get designs to render properly in, and Microsoft seemingly oblivious to a number of these concerns, it looks like they have ignored the general consensus again.

A campaign was started by the Email Standards Project and quickly created a buzz on Twitter as people announced their astonishment at the decision and after a day of condemnation and much gnashing of teeth, Microsoft announced their response to the concerns on the Outlook Blog by basically saying “thanks for telling us we’re wrong but we’re going to ignore you anyway”, as only Microsoft can.

First off, this is my first post in a while and it’s all my fault – must do better!

Just a quick update for this post, as myprevious posts show I’m now finished university for the summer and am once again working at Reach Further here in sunny Leeds. It looks like a busy summer as things are going well at work, with plenty to do.

I’m also planning to brush up on my skills outwith work by attending events like DrupalCamp UK and also Future of Web Design in Glasgow. I do have other posts lined up over the next couple of weeks so will get back in the swing of posting on a more regular basis.

As my first year of university comes to an end, I was reading the latest issue of .net magazine and came across the article written by Jack Osborne about what to do after leaving university in order to gain employment within the industry. Although I’ve not yet reached that stage yet, there is a few tips that anyone at any stage of education can implement now in order to increase chances.

Portfolio:

Jack states that the portfolio of any work should be in the right order and as good as it can be as that is where potential employers will look first. Students are often encouraged to leave out university work from their portfolio but often that is all students have, and goes back to the old adage that they can’t get a job due to lack of experience but no-one’s willing to offer that experience. In my portfolio, two thirds of it is university based as that is all I have at the moment but another useful tip which I will implement over the summer is to “fake it”. By creating websites for imaginary clients it will give me a chance to improve both my design and coding skills as well as boosting my portfolio.

Read More

Just the one image this week, taken from iTunesterms and conditions.

Don’t know how anyone would achieve this but it’s certainly illegal!

With the recent release of Internet Explorer 8 and the even more recent announcement that the browser will be included in Windows Updates, the issue of Internet Explorer 6 rears it’s ugly head again. As people within the web industry we know all about the issues we face surrounding IE6 and have done for a while now, but will this latest release see the end of IE6 or will it be hanging around for a while yet.

Read More