Why Every Template Link Is a Role, Not a URL
A real defect in an earlier version of the template corpus — thousands of dead href="#" links that passed a shallow test — is why every link in the email app's templates is now a typed role instead of a raw URL.
Most "how we build templates" posts are marketing. This one is closer to an incident report with a fix attached, and it's worth telling because the fix is a genuinely good idea that came from a genuinely real problem.
An earlier version of the email app's template corpus had roughly 1,920 links across its templates that pointed at href="#" — syntactically valid, technically non-empty, and going absolutely nowhere. They passed the quality gate that existed at the time, because that gate only checked that an href attribute was present and non-empty. # satisfies that check while doing nothing useful for an actual recipient, and — because the send pipeline only rewrites https:// links for click tracking — a # link was also untrackable on top of being dead. The gate was measuring "an href attribute exists," which was never actually the property worth having.
The fix changes what a link is, not just how it's validated. Every link in the current template system is typed as a LinkTarget, and that type is a closed set with exactly two shapes: a real url (an actual https:// address, used sparingly, for the rare case a template genuinely knows its destination) or a merge field, which names the role a link plays — a call-to-action, an unsubscribe link, a "view in browser" link — and lets the actual destination get filled in at send time, per recipient, per campaign.
That's the real insight: a template can't know a customer's specific destination URL when it's written, so pretending otherwise (by writing a real-looking href that's actually a placeholder) is how you end up with 1,920 dead links passing a test that thought it was checking something meaningful. Naming the link's role instead of faking a URL means there's no placeholder to forget to replace, because there's nothing pretending to be a real address in the first place.
It's a small, specific engineering story rather than a broad claim about template quality — but it's the kind of specific, verifiable fix that's more credible than any amount of "our templates are professionally built" marketing copy could be on its own.