Good questions. I fully support DOM Spaghetti Aversion, but Angular's approach is quite different from PHP. I'd hate for people to dismiss it because they heard

Good questions. I fully support DOM Spaghetti Aversion, but Angular's approach is quite different from PHP. I'd hate for people to dismiss it because they heard its the new PHP or because it cosmetically resembles an anti-pattern. To answer your specific concerns, you can in fact imperatively bind Angular controllers to route views in the app's configuration block. However, this approach doesn't always make sense—you can have multiple apps in a page, each app having multiple controllers, so they can't all use the URL as the engine of application state. In cases like this you can your view as a directive, and then you can inject the appropriate controller (in fact this is exactly how ng-view works with the router). Or, you can take the approach quoted above, and use an XML-like declarative configuration language to describe the view and its relationship to whatever happens to be its controller, and let the compiler generate the appropriate HTML for you. (I'm kidding, it's HTML all the way. But in Angular, the view describes its own structure, appearance and behavior, the controller is concerned with mutating state and not DOM manipulation.) I'm not trying to evangelize, just put some good information out there. Backbone's templates, as I recall, use ERB-style syntax to push values and imperative code into templates, which then set up their models (http://backbonejs.org/#FAQ-bootstrap http://backbonejs.org/#FAQ-bootstrap). I think you agree it would be unfair to put down Backbone as the new PHP based on that fact that its templates let you write in that style. Enjoy!