Microsft Outlook 2010 – Using Words Rendering Engine??
So today I came across a tweet from Chris Coyier over at CSS-Tricks about this campaign site http://www.fixoutlook.org/ and I thought it was a good cause so I tweeted along with it and decided to give my 2 cents worth about why I think this situation has come about.
So say for a moment you are a programmer in Microsoft, a big huge company, lots of programs, lots of stuff going on. Now you’ll be put in a team to work on one product, makes sense yeah? Awesome so we are on the same wavelength so far 
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Now lets say you are on the Office Product team, you work on outlook along side word, excel etc. (each application having a smaller team where each team keeps in constant and/or close contact). Now lets say I turn round to you (remember your working in the outlook team) and say hey can you add in HTML rendering support for e-mails. Now you have a couple of choices:
- Write a completely new rendering engine for outlook
- Use IE’s already built in rendering engine
- Use the rendering engine, which you have team members near by, who built it, offer support and this is what you did last time
Starting to see where this is going yet?
So option 1, simple answer – No. Compared to the other 2 options, any programmer would weigh up the costs and say this is too expensive, the gain would be great (if written correctly obcourse) but the managers of the project would say the gains wouldn’t justify the cost.
Second option and third option (In my opinion this is the real debatable choice and I’m sure someone will completely disagree with me on this). Now you can ask the nice people over in the IE team to give you their rendering engine to use in your outlook application or you can use the in-house rendering engine built by your fellow Word team members. Now if IE team has little to no contact with the Office team then it’ll be hard to get changes made to the code to work with outlook if there’s some specific technical change required.
Realistically the project managers should be getting IE team to write the rendering engine to meet some specification written by the outlook team and then there be some cross over period where they both work on bringing the two together. However outlook have done this Word rendering engine before and perhaps the managers of the project didn’t view this as a problem and not a critical feature to support full HTML properly? That being said did the developers argue it out and say that the word rendering engine simply won’t cut it in the current state of web standards?
Anyway little rant over – all in all I think its a shame and it’ll get interesting when:
- Google release Wave (which I’m Google will use their Chrome rendering engine to cut down some of the work)
- Will Mozilla release a Thunderbird like client for Wave?
- Even more interestingly, will Microsoft ever give-in to Wave at any point and just put their hands up and say, we have to conform to this?
- Will wave just be a bit of a flop?? (Will all no it won’t but I gotta just put the option out there otherwise Im just MS bashing)
Let me know what you all think.