Well... questionably good news.
I get newsletters from an organization called SitePoint.com that keep me relatively updated on what's going on in the land of web design from a webmaster's point of view. They recently posted an interesting blog entry relating that Microsoft's newest release of Outlook is going to use the same engine to render HTML as MS Word. In sending out emails that contain any type of markup language, designers need to cater to the lowest common denominator to ensure that their documents render correctly; this lowest common denominator will shortly be this new version of Outlook. The people at SitePoint.com are understandably irritated at having to curtail all their fancy (and often much more efficient) methods of coding.
So why do I say this is good news for us? If I understand correctly, it means that the basic HTML that we know how to use may be the best thing to use. As writers, we are more likely to be asked to write (and or design) a email communication than to design a whole website (which would be more likely to need advanced coding abilities). For once, there is some small benefit to one of Microsoft's blunders! Hurray!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Thanks for sharing this link. I'm not sure I understand how this is good news for us, though. Would you elaborate? I see how it can be a pain for more sophisticated coders, but I'm not following how this is necessarily a ringing endorsement for basic HTML or us. Do you mean that this will leave HTML experts to design websites while we'll be more likely to get the writing jobs?
I'm choosing to look at it from this angle: If the new LCD (lowest common denominator) email service can only read basic HTML, and I can only code basic HTML, I am therefore just as qualified to create email communications as a super-savvy coder who can do all kinds of fancy AJAX, JAVA, and other crazy scripts.
The expert coders (notoriously NOT good writers) can keep taking care of websites and hopefully techical writers, who can produce basic coding and write well, may be put in charge of these emails. I'm trying for optimism here. ;D
Post a Comment