Example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9365851/separating-templa...
new View({el: domElement})
Always having an element means that you can worry less about view state. If all of your DOM events are delegated from the root element, you don't have to worry about whether the template has been rendered yet, which particular template might have been rendered, whether the data is available yet, and so on... The events continue to work regardless.
You don't have to do it if you don't want to. Simplest way to not do it is just implement your custom `render`, and you'll have everything in an empty `div` (the default). If you want your template root to be the element's root (el/$el) as well, you can quite trivially do so by calling View#setElement from View#render:
render: function () {
return this.setElement($(renderTemplate()));
}
Also, there's no logic in that part, it's just a declarative mapping of your DOM root.
(the caveats of the guy who answered on SO still apply, this will not handle re-rendering as-is and a broken template generating multiple roots will not work correctly)