Believe me, writing HTML for email that works for most clients is notoriously hard, no amount of code experience can help with that :)
This was exactly the reason I went with MJML. Consumer should focus on designing the email, Templatical takes care of converting the design to MJML and rest with MJML is already battle-proven.
Holy shit, it's you! Thank you, that genuinely means a lot coming from you!
GrapesJS is the forever OG that proved this whole space could be an embeddable SDK rather than a paywalled SaaS. It also standardized the palette/canvas/inspector layout that every serious visual builder now ships by default — including Templatical. I took direct inspiration from a few other patterns too: the block-as-first-class-citizen model, and the trait system, which maps almost 1:1 to how Templatical's custom blocks expose typed fields into the inspector.
And yeah — agreed on MJML. Building email layouts that work for most clients is notoriously hard. I think the people who built MJML absorbed an enormous amount of pain so the rest of us don't have to.
People who know how painful email HTML is are the exact audience here. I believe MJML is the best thing that happened to emails — eliminates almost all the cross-client compatibility quirks.
If your team gives it a spin, I'd genuinely love their feedback.