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Comment by bmm6o | Hacker News Reader

The workarounds to handle client-side templating seem dirty. Is it really true that e.g. Handlebars requires you to send illegal HTML to the browser? That seems like such a bad idea.

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I've been using <script type=”text/html“> to hold bits of HTML I want to quilt together client-side.

I build all my templates in HTML, and then store all the different content to populate the templates in script tags. I can then use JavaScript to swap it out, and even hide/reveal unused templates.

It's 100% valid though, handlebars are not valid HTML, at least not until processed and rendered.

The <template> tag is meant for that - not only are the contents inert, but they're also exempt from HTML5's special processing rules, so you can eg. put them in tables without having them foster parented.

The big issue right now is IE support, but most browsers are coming along with it:

http://caniuse.com/template

It's not so much about invalid HTML as it is about superset of HTML. I don't like it either but certain constructs seem hard to implement otherwise. Changing attribute value is easy within HTML boundaries but anything related to presence of attribute and they have no choice but to wrap it somehow (they could wrap it with other attributes, of course, but that would probably be too verbose).

One of the reasons I added this support was so we could use the parser on our client-side handlebars templates to identify glyph usages and build the smallest possible custom fonts.

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