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All hail the great Lord WYSIWYG
Fri 23 Jan 2009, 12:05 PM
Tweetby Ben Langhinrichs
In Lotus Notes rich text, just as in HTML/CSS or in MS Word or Symphony, there are different ways to create content that appear identical to the user. It isn't always obvious what you are really seeing. Because of that, there can appear to be very, very different results when rendering similar looking rich text as HTML or MIME. For example, look at the following five similar looking "tables". If the text in the middle did not explain what each was, you might think they were identical, but instead they are a mixture of paragraph and tables with borders on and off in various configurations. (If you didn't know, more recent versions of Notes allow a paragraph to have borders, which can be quite handy) Besides these, I could have used other techniques such as a combination of two layers or an an image to make the same appearance, but the ones I chose are used far more frequently and casually, so they make a better test case, in my opinion.
After emailing this content to Outlook 2003, the different renderings become obvious. Perhaps most annoying, the renderings are different between the Notes client rendering and the Domino server rendering. Of course, I added the iFidelity rendering at the end, just to poke a fork into it.
Email with various tables and pseudo-tables in Lotus Notes 8.0.1 client
Email in Outlook 2003 after being rendered to MIME by Lotus Notes 8.0.1 server
Email in Outlook 2003 after being rendered to MIME by Lotus Notes 8.0.1 client
Email in Outlook 2003 after being rendered to MIME by Lotus Notes 8.5.0 client (just to show it has not improved)
Email in Outlook 2003 after being rendered to MIME by iFidelity (BETA)
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