My best attempt: HTML already has a bunch of behaviors embedded in it. Links, styles, dropdown menus, input fields, radio boxes, etc. The angular devs are simp

My best attempt: HTML already has a bunch of behaviors embedded in it. Links, styles, dropdown menus, input fields, radio boxes, etc. The angular devs are simply embracing the declarative nature of HTML and extending its available behaviors. In that respect, angular is actually treating HTML more like it was intended to be treated. And I agree with the OP's lamentations about the javascript being completely divorced from the HTML. You end up with code that is so decoupled it's a major undertaking for someone new to your project to figure out what's going on. In an angular.js app, all they need do is look at the HTML and they can get a good idea what's supposed to be happening and where. edit: And the truth is, jQuery apps aren't polluting the HTML any more than Angular apps, they're just doing it in the form of additional CSS classes and IDs and "data" attributes. In that respect, you could say that jQuery pollutes the css declarations.