October 2021 | BEE HTML for Email 3.0 – Beefree SDK Help Center

Summary

We're excited to announce the release of BEE HTML for Email 3.0!

This latest build offers several improvements over the previous version, including:

Faster design rendering
Reduced output file size
Simpler, cleaner HTML output
Wider email client compatibility, including reduced Gmail clipping

This document is a brief description of the new release. For a more in-depth description of the technical changes, please see this article.

About BEE HTML for Email

This component is the product of a long-term research and experimentation process. Optimized cross-platform email client compatibility is the ultimate goal.

We apply continual improvement and analysis processes to keep this component up-to-date. Thus, we have engineered our development model to synchronize with industry best practices. This allows us to maintain pace with market-adopted solutions and techniques.

In most cases, we find that we can adapt to any changes with minor modifications to our HTML markup syntax. On occasion, though, we find that a more comprehensive change is necessary.

BEE HTML for Email 3.0 represents a major revision to this component. This update provides a smaller HTML footprint, reduced Gmail clipping, and other benefits as described in this article.

New Features

HTML File Compression

Our average exported HTML data footprint size has decreased roughly ~56% over previous builds. We've based these findings on extensive testing of over 600 designs.

Summary of Key Changes:

Faster loading and rendering
Reduced mobile clipping
Reduced bandwidth consumption

Improved HTML Rendering

This is a basic overview of the updated architecture. Additional documentation will be released soon.

In version 3.0, we have moved from a DIV element-based fluid hybrid design to a more standard table layout. This minimizes the number of conditional comments and CSS media queries. As a result, HTML files are smaller and more efficiently coded.

Summary of Key Changes:

Migration from <div> to <table> formatted codebase
Most Content Blocks have been re-coded for conciseness
Final HTML code is now compressed to remove whitespace between tags
Transparent dividers are now automatically converted into padding

API Performance

This is a basic overview of the updated architecture. Additional documentation will be released soon.

This new architecture grants both performance and stability improvements. Based on our tests, HTML for Email 3.0 is faster by a factor of 75% (average) and 60% (median). Data throughput is also improved: 12.13 vs 11.66 transactions/sec.

The performance of the BEE Content Service API for users with large template libraries is also improved.

Summary of Key Changes:

Improved response time, almost 8x faster HTML rendering from JSON
Optimized to support heavier workloads, minimizing potential errors during peak load times

Activating BEE HTML for Email 3.0

If you are currently using the SDK, you can enable the new version in your account at developers.beefree.io. We strongly recommend doing this in a development instance before using it in production. This is particularly important if your application applies any postprocessing to the HTML, as the general structure and tag syntax have changed.

The new version is enabled in new instances of the SDK by default. You can disable it at any time to revert to the previous version.

The activation widget is available in application details:

You will be asked to confirm the version change. Again, be sure you have tested thoroughly before applying to your production environment!

Activation Window

You can opt-in to test HTML for Email 3.0 until March 31, 2022. After this date, all instances of Beefree SDK will use the new markup format.

We recommend the following steps well in advance of this date:

Enable BEE HTML 3.0 in your development instance.
Test your message creation workflow. Identify any potential issues that occur due to the markup change. For example, a post-process may append an attribute to a markup element that no longer exists.
Report any issues that you cannot resolve to Beefree SDK support so we may troubleshoot them.
Enable BEE HTML 3.0 in your production instance.
Run through your workflow once more in production.

Previous Updates

If you're interested in learning about previous versions of BEE HTML for Email click here.

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October 2021 | BEE HTML for Email 3.0

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Summary

About BEE HTML for Email