weld

Yeah, I love knockout. And honestly with version 2, they've implemented native templates, which basically means you can write your templates in HTML instead of strings (gasp!). I much prefer this concept. Templates in strings never made sense to me when we already have a DOM to take advantage of, but only recently have I seen some of the great work out there to make this possible, like this, Lift's CSS selector transforms (http://simply.liftweb.net/index-7.10.html ), Nodejitsu's weld (https://github.com/hij1nx/weld ), etc.

I was inspired by this project for Node: https://github.com/hij1nx/weld And I tried the concept using Nokogiri in Ruby. I found that in practice it gets really tedious. I had to make sure that every single element I wanted to manipulate had a unique id. Then I had to account for updating the content of an element versus an arbitrary attribute for that element. Or adding an attribute, like some data-* attribute. I realized why string interpolation is just so much easier. There's also the problem where the DOM parser changes the original HTML in some way. How will it deal with conditional comments for IE? Or slightly malformed HTML that you want to keep that way? I ended up going back to Handlebars.

Backbone itself doesn't have template support, but there are loads of libraries for that. There is a list in this performance rundown: http://jsperf.com/dom-vs-innerhtml-based-templating/160 Another path is "anti templates" like http://beebole.com/pure/ or https://github.com/hij1nx/weld