[tracker1]

Node/JS won't necessarily render HTML faster. There are libraries to bring DOM interaction into NodeJS, there's also PhantomJS, and previous attempts like Aptana's server. All of these have been very heavy, and didn't scale well. PhantomJS is probably the best current option, but doesn't tie directly to Node, and still not as fast as string based templating.

Regarding string based templates, they are really implementation dependant, and there are tons of options available. Right now some common ones for NodeJS are probably Bliss (Razor inspired), Nunjucks (jinja2 inspired), Mustache/Handlebars and Jade (Haml inspired), and EJS (similar to PHP, or classic ASP).

Probably the most broadly available is Mustache, which has implementations in about every language under the sun, and probably could make a decent benchmark to compare string processing in different languages.

All of the above simply bring me, to use what you feel comfortable with and what feels right.