See the branch I made, https://github.com/csaftoiu/angular-ui-form-validation/tree/fix-custom-template . On the demo, I changed /views/errorTemplateOne.html to:

<div>ab <small class="error" >a - {{errorMessage}} - b</small> bc</div>

However, when validation fails on a minlength error (with validation-min-length="{template:'/views/errorTemplateOne.html', value:6}"), it just shows the error message, without any of the <div> or <small> that I added.