There are a number of things I would like to see fixed and improved in MS Office 2010, and I would have to say that how Outlook handles HTML/CSS is nowhere near the top of my priority list.

William Kennedy, Microsoft's VP of Office responds to a recent campaign to being attention to the fact that Outlook 2010 will use MS Word as its HTML authoring and rendering engine. The short version is that they think MS Word's handling of HTML/CSS is pretty good, there is no standard for how to handle HTML email, and the Email Standards Project is not a standards body anyway, so they have no intention of listening to them.

Unfortunately for Microsoft this excuse falls flat with developers, mostly because there are standards for HTML and CSS that MS could follow and create a viable subset from. The problem is MS Word which is used to edit all Outlook email messages (plain text, RTF, or HTML). It is MS Word's inability to render HTML/CSS that is the problem here, or more specially, MS's refusal to recode MS Word so that it can handle HTML/CSS layouts. I think this is doable, but more complicated then suggested by the folks at the Email Standards Project.

It should be noted, however, that the Email Standards Project is an initiative of a company that sells email marketing software, and the developers who want to use HTML and CSS layout in email are for the most part email marketing folks who want to deliver heavily branded email messages to our inboxes, something IMHO we can do without. This is why I have Outlook set to render all email as plain text (Thank you Microsoft, btw, for that bit of functionality!) regardless of the format it is sent in.

Despite the fact that Microsoft's reasoning is a bit weak, I'm glad that they are not being distracted by the ESP's campaign.