Take a look at this:
<!--[if gte mso 9]>
<![endif]-->Chances are the general syntax will be instantly familiar — it’s a conditional comment, useful for feeding specific content only to Windows versions of Internet Explorer. But did you know they work for Office applications too?
Neither did I … until recently.
We’ve just overhauled the HTML templates for our email newsletters … a painful process to be sure — if you think that web browsers are harsh task-masters, you should try coding to suit email clients! A recent article, How to Code HTML Email Newsletters, spells out just how convoluted it can be, and how arcane are the techniques you have to resort to, to produce a decent layout in the most popular email clients. And the issue has been further complicated by the fact that one of the most popular Windows clients — Outlook — no longer uses Internet Explorer for HTML rendering, it uses Word!
And it was while perusing the franken-code that passes for “Save as Web Page” output from a Word document, that I first saw these little nuggets — exactly what we needed to hide bits of content from Outlook that were just too mangled to leave.
So there you go. If you’re publishing HTML email and struggling with Outlook’s rendering, here’s an extra little tool for the kit. The syntax even implies that it can be used for granular targetting of Office versions all the way back; but I haven’t tested this, so any information is gratefully received :)
July 18th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I’m viewing this post in Opera 9.5 and the conditional comment doesn’t show up even though it did when I was viewing the feed entry from within Opera.
And on the subject of your new HTML emails, they actually appear a bit broken in the header when viewed in Opera (the old version wasn’t).
July 18th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Hmmm, I’ve just come back to the page again and I can see the CC now. Not sure what was going on before. :/
July 18th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Yeah I know they are a little out of whack in opera (because like you, i live and breathe in opera :)) but they weren’t really targetted at web browsers - there’s only so many client environments one can deal with at a time :)
July 21st, 2008 at 12:23 pm
>>Outlook — no longer uses Internet Explorer for HTML rendering, it uses Word!
I knew there was another reason why I won’t use Outlook. Don’t use Word, either. Wish I didn’t use Windows.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Nice one guys, this could really make life easier those (too frequent) occasions when Outlook 2007 won’t play ball. We did some additional testing on this method and wrote about the results on our blog.
July 26th, 2008 at 12:32 am
This is a huge help! I’ve tried conditional comments to target different email clients to no avail, but never would have tried “gte mso 9“. What does this mean?
July 31st, 2008 at 2:25 am
Brothercake: Get rid of Opera!!!
August 6th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Greater Than or Equal to MicroSoft Outlook 9
August 7th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Ah, it almost makes too much sense.. I’m still quite surprised that it works. Many many kudos to James Edwards and Sitepoint! My boss came back to me and asked me how I got this to work. Keep the .html email stuff coming!!
November 9th, 2008 at 11:10 am
The ‘o’ refers to ‘office’ not just ‘outlook’. If you save Word or Excel docs as ‘Web page’ you’ll see the same kind of thing.
Across versions of Microsoft Office (since Office2000) MS has been changing the markup formats its apps use. They are largely incompatible with one another. The conditionals help sort out differences mainly to assist with interoperability of documents among versions of MSOffice (and IE).
A cynic might say that OOXML is Microsoft’s attempt to set a standard for itself.
November 9th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Just because a statement is cynical, doesn’t mean it’s not true ;) Of course OOXML is Microsoft ratifying their own proprietary format as a standard, which is why it was initially rejected, and why it should never have been accepted. The whole thing smells bad to me.