At fixoutlook.org, they’ve started a Twitter campaign to ask Microsoft to fix Outlook’s standards compliance w.r.t., HTML and standards compliance. Even my brother, Jeroen, who is usually a big Microsoft fan, got in in it - which is how I got to know about it.

I can understand Microsoft’s arguments for using Word as Outlook’s editor, but I don’t understand why they can’t implement a decent HTML export in Word - especially since Word saves in an XML format, so it should be a simple matter of applying a XSL stylesheet.

Another thing tgat surprised me is that they use Word to render the HTML as well: I would have guessed they’d use Explorer, which would render Word’s HTML just as well (hopefully - if Microsoft can’t export IE-readible HTML, who can?) and would probably do a better job at standards compliance than Word would.

What really got me, though, was the other reader’s compliance levels, according to the E-mail Standards Project, which showed that though GMail is web-based, it doesn’t render HTML mail correctly and neither do most other E-mail clients I use. What’s the deal there? Is it really that difficult?

I am flabbergasted.