This is an example for brevity but certainly misleading if you're not familiar with Angular. You're right that this is typically an anti-pattern, but it's one t

This is an example for brevity but certainly misleading if you're not familiar with Angular. You're right that this is typically an anti-pattern, but it's one that Angular tries to eliminate, even though it is using a similar looking mechanism. Angular controllers expose an API for the widget they enclose, but it leaves the wiring up to the designer. Sometimes it makes sense to sprinkle event bindings onto the DOM via code, but there are many cases where it doesn't. My code almost never needs to know exactly what element(s) are bound to a method, so it makes sense to me to just declare that stuff right in the document. As a side point, you can't evaluate arbitrary JavaScript in Angular attributes. Angular parses the attributes and evaluates them as in a JavaScript-like way, but with some exceptions. See http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/expression http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/expression