[wonnage]

Ideally you would preprocess your assets server-side (e.g Jammit), so templates end up being just another script to load.

This is still ugly, in that debugging templates is an impossible pain the arse because there's no useful line information. On the plus side they're much easier to read than a chain of DOM manipulations.

It's arguable whether this is "better". I usually have to interact with the DOM programmatically anyway (attaching events, for example), so why not build the DOM in javascript as well?