I don't think that it is useful for a standard site, one that needs to be indexed by search engines and needs all of it's content to be available on page load.

I don't think that it is useful for a standard site, one that needs to be indexed by search engines and needs all of it's content to be available on page load. I have made use of it in single page web applications before, though. It completely blows hand generation of HTML out of the water for maintainability. You can keep your templates inside of the HTML page using a <script> element with a special type, and keeps a lot of that view logic out of your JavaScript. It also provides a nice alternative to using a hidden element and cloning it, then switching attributes, text, and values.