When a global region is empty, don't render HTML comment annotations into it

Conceptually related: 🐛 [Needs design] Previews of pages containing (dynamically) empty blocks are malformed Active .

Is this referring to:

• the outer <!-- xb-region-start-$region -->
• or to the inner <!-- xb-region-content-start-$region -->
• or both?

I'm assuming both.

wim leers → credited effulgentsia → .

Confirmed that exposing the Sidebar region in Olivero no longer breaks the page layout before anything has been added. Merged.

Noticed that there are empty regions marked by HTML comments. These empty region annotations aren’t visible in the UI and don’t affect the page layout, but they are still present in the markup and can be accessed via right-click in the UI.

<!-- xb-region-start-content -->
<!-- xb-region-end-content -->

The reported issue specifically appears for the block-olivero-content block.

Additionally, I observed other HTML comments appearing in the markup at the same time, such as:

<!-- xb-region-content-end-primary_menu -->
<!-- xb-region-end-primary_menu -->
<!-- xb-region-start-secondary_menu -->

These might be related to the same handling logic and could require a quick review to ensure consistency across regions.

Thanks for testing this, @mayur-sose, and posting what your found!

I believe both of your findings are "works as designed", so I'm setting this back to Fixed.

<!-- xb-region-start-content -->
<!-- xb-region-end-content -->

This is about the content region, which is not a global region. Global regions are all the ones except for the one named "content". The reason it's okay (in fact, desired) for the content region to have those comments, even if otherwise empty, is those comments identify where you would drop something into, and the UI does allow dragging and dropping into the content region, even when the content region is empty, so we need those comments there. The reason this issue removed the comments from the global regions, is that unlike the content region, the UI does not allow dragging and dropping into an empty global region: to put something into an empty global region, you can only do it via the context menu (right click), not with drag-and-drop.

<!-- xb-region-content-end-primary_menu -->
<!-- xb-region-end-primary_menu -->

Here, "content" is in the middle of the name, not the end of the name, so this isn't referring to the content region, but is referring to the content of the primary_menu region (yeah, it's confusing for the word "content" to mean different things in different contexts). So what this is saying is that the primary_menu region ends immediately after the content of that region ends. In other words, the primary_region doesn't have any wrapper markup around its content. That's perfectly normal.

<!-- xb-region-end-primary_menu -->
<!-- xb-region-start-secondary_menu -->

This is saying that the secondary_menu region starts immediately after the primary_menu region ends. Also perfectly normal.

So, all of the above cases are fine and expected, but great that you called them out so that we double checked to make sure. The ones we want to make sure aren't happening are:

<!-- xb-region-start-ANYTHING_OTHER_THAN_"content" -->
<!-- xb-region-end-ANYTHING_OTHER_THAN_"content" -->

or

<!-- xb-region-content-start-ANYTHING_OTHER_THAN_"content" -->
<!-- xb-region-content-end-ANYTHING_OTHER_THAN_"content" -->

If you find either of those, please re-open this.

#11++

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.