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.