FWIW, GWT's UiBinder takes a similar, absolutely-no-logic approach to templates. No iteration even: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideUiBind

FWIW, GWT's UiBinder takes a similar, absolutely-no-logic approach to templates. No iteration even: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideUiBinder.html http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideUiBinde... Takes awhile to get used to, but it's nice to have all your logic in the controller, once you're used to it. Plus being only-static HTML, ui.xml files are amenable to code-generation, e.g. making interfaces for the views (which ends up similar to your controller view classes). Java, XML, and build-time code generation are terribly un-hip, I know, but personally something I've grown to like (I have an open source framework, gwtmpv.org based around these ideas). As far as most-pure templating language, I think that goes to the appropriately named "pure", which lacks any notion of it's own special characters in the markup: http://beebole.com/pure/ http://beebole.com/pure/ I haven't used it, so am not entirely sure how well it ends up working in a real-world apps/templates, but it initially seems pretty slick.