I have a script that builds an HTML document and sends it out as an E-Mail. The problem we were seeing was that Outlook (Microsoft's E-Mail reader application) was having problems displaying the HTML document, while the raw document looked fine when I viewed it in my browser. Within Outlook, the HTML would render fine for a while, then it would drop down into showing the raw HTML, then go back to rendering the page. It was irritating.

I was using a template to generate the HTML document, so the tags were all matched: a starting and ending table tag, within that, a bunch of paired tr tags, and within each row, paired td or th tags. I've been generating tables in HTML since the late 90's, so I'm pretty sure that's right. The only new thing I've added is using styles that are defined in the page header.

Anyway, a new employee on the client team put my vanilla HTML into ChatGPT to see if it could identify what the problem was. ChatGPT listed six problems:

1. Invalid table headers - except they were all matched, and contained within a tr element;
2. CSS issues - telling me that border-collapse: collapse would be better than border-collapse: separate; - irrelevant;
3. Missing closing th tags - same error as #1. All tags were matched;
4. Potentially Incorrect Data Formatting - suggesting that <td class='left'>0</td> would be better displayed as <td class='left'>0.00</td>, which was irrelevant;
5. Incorrect HTML Tag Nesting (Semantics Issue) - this was reporting that a style was declared in the page header but never used, irrelevant; and
6. Email Signature Formatting - some discussion about how the confidentiality statement was too wordy.

None of these points addressed the issue of display breakage in Outlook. The only problem I could see in the file I was generating was that there were a few blank lines in the HTML document.

Oh.

Oh no. Really?

Finally, at 8pm last night, I realized what the problem was. Blank lines. Outlook doesn't like blank lines within an HTML document. It interprets that as the end of the document, and goes back to showing raw text. Until the HTML starts up again, at which point (for some special, lucky, magic, Microsoft reasons) it goes back to showing the interpreted HTML. Oh, Microsoft.

ChatGPT didn't pick up on the blank lines, instead, it picked up on a bunch of inconsequential or irrelevant issues with the HTML.

So, I'm still a little suspicious of AI in general. It's not yet at the point where it can make creative leaps; it still wants to examine each grain of sand on the beach, rather than look at the shape of the dune. Sure, maybe ChatGPT should have been specifically prompted with 'Outlook isn't rendering this HTML document correctly, tell me why' -- but I think you can get better mileage by Telling It To The Bear, or having another pair of eyes looking at the problem.

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