17th July 2022: We are happy to announce and release support for editing HTML comments and email templates which was previously impossible due to the lack of support for HTML comments — which also meant no conditional-comments — in the HTML Editor by PageSection.
Previously when using the editor, all HTML comments were ignored thus neither saved nor processed as we thought this was OK for majority of projects — since the editor focussed on "visual editing" of which comments are not rendered as visible elements in HTML projects — or so we thought. Problems set in when users started uploading HTML email templates, which normally involve the use of conditional-comments to help render the email differently across different email clients for responsiveness, which led to incompatibility and failure when using our online services.
It was a silly mistake, we assumed users would not need comments because they are mostly used for 'explaining code' rather than affecting the code output. HTML comments have special uses, especially for compatibility, and we humbly apologize for any inconvieniences caused to our users who found the lack of support to be an issue.
However this is something that has been quite the issue, and only until recently did we realize an easy solution which involved treating comments in the same format we use to deal with textnodes when editing HTML projects. This meant creating custom HTML tags, adding changes to our HTML parsing algorithms, and many other miscellaneous changes. We were also able to identify and fix a variety of other critical bugs in our software and we believe to have made significant improvements.
Our solution to the problem involves allowing HTML comments only within the <head> and <body> tags. This means other HTML comments like those outside the <html> tags will be ignored mainly to preserve the HTML Editor's (element-structure) tree which expects only one root element (the <html> tag) and one <head> and <body> tag.
These bug fixes and updates unlock new possibilities in our products and services, in this case, letting us provide better quality editable HTML templates which include support for conditional-comments and explanatory comments.
Explanatory comments will be used to better explain the HTML code when necessary, while the conditional-comments will be used for backward-compatibility, responsiveness and many other special (browser-based) features, including the support of HTML email templates.
When sending electronic mail, users can pick between using plain-text or sending HTML emails which tend to have better designs and more interactive content. HTML emails tend to look and feel better than plain-text emails and therefore tend to boost user engagement rates. They are beneficial and widely used by web content creators.
PageSection provides products and services for web creators, and we would therefore like to announce official support for editable HTML email templates. In the future, we would like to provide higher quality free-to-use HTML email templates and we may as well hire freelancers to create a few samples that we can provide to our users at no extra cost.
For starters, here is a nice tutorial blog provided by Envato that can serve as an introduction in case you want to get started in designing custom HTML email templates. We also cloned the MIT licensed (free-to-use) sample email template and packaged it as a live-demo that you can edit with PageSection's editor. Credit to Nicole Merlin as the original author of the template.
If you have an HTML template that you would like to edit, simply upload a zip file containing HTML, CSS, JavaScript web project files. Follow the steps below, or contact the support team via email support@pagesection.com for more information.
Get HTML Project
This could be a website for a client, or for personal use. Get the necessary project files of the website to upload
Create Zip File
Put the website (project) files in a single zipped (.zip) file, include an index.html at the "top" and not within another folder
Upload Zip File
Upload the zip file using our service to create a project and receive a link. Later you can edit or delete the project
Receive Web Link
After any successful project upload, you will receive a web URL link which can be used to visit or share the website
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