HTML isn't meant to handle presentation. Ideally, it's a way of marking up content to allow an arbitrary presentation layer to be laid on top. I prefer generat

HTML isn't meant to handle presentation. Ideally, it's a way of marking up content to allow an arbitrary presentation layer to be laid on top. I prefer generating HTML content through s-expressions. It's more flexible and concise than a templating library, and it forces you to bear in mind the separation of content and presentation. In turn, this makes it easier to unit-test the views, and to write automated integration tests. For instance, if I were a designer writing a template, I have control over both the CSS and the HTML. This might tempt me to write the HTML around a particular design: <div class="post"> <div class="small"> <%= post.points %> points by <%= author.name %> </div> </div> But if I am a programmer, without necessarily much knowledge of the presentation, I might be more careful to write more semantic HTML that's presentation-neutral. [:div.post {:id (str "post-" (:id post))} [:div.header [:span.points (:points post)] " points by " [:span.author (:name author)]] Which has the useful side effect of making it easier to write tests: (is (= (css-select "#post-1 .author" (:body response)) "Test User"))