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Comment by skylan_q | Hacker News Reader

As someone who is learning to use backbone and underscore templates, I'll second this. But I've got to say that Handlebars looks like another decent option.

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I'd go so far as to say 'just use Handlebars', as at some point you will need an 'each' construct which underscore templates don't provide. They're okay for minimal templates that are akin to string interpolation, but as soon as you 'get serious' you end up writing things like <% _.each(things, function(thing){ %> which is just horrible.

Mustache-based templates (mustache, handlebars, hogan.js), though they are a bitch in their schooling you on being 'logicless' really are in my experience, very practical.

And please no-one downvote me by nitpicking that templates can never be truly logicless, I know that :)

I tend to prefer mustache, because I can use the same template code server-side and client side trivially. It's nice for cases where you are pre-filling stuff, or where you want to render for no-script situations.

It might be better to say that it's free of control flow structures[0]. This is my preferred approach but it can definitely take some adaptation if you're used to doing a lot more in your views.

[0] I wonder if partials count? I don't know that all of the moustache derivatives have them anyway.

While I do love and use Handlebars for our Backbone app, if you find yourself using a lot of such each block helpers... you may want to create a new Backbone view to handle that

Does anyone use Dust? http://akdubya.github.com/dustjs/

Some discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3349845

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