Common approaches to using a HTML template are to:
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Use a library like Mustache
What parts of Mustache are good?
Offers caching of compiling templates
Is this premature optimization?
Optional special character escaping of some values - using triple {{{}}} bracket notation.
Simple if and if not present solution - show what to print if something is not there.
Expressed in one file - good
What parts of Mustache are not good?
Lot of contributors for something for should be simple
ECMA literals also could be used as templating mechanism by themselves.
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Mustache is a fine templating library and liked by a lot of people. However I see these drawbacks:
600 lines of code, 9 contributors for 20 line code problem - it’s therefore difficult to understand completely.
All data is automatically escaped for special characters in HTML.
In mustache programmers need to learn from the school of hard knocks to always use {{{ }}} syntax for tokens - otherwise user data with these special characters can break the application.
It’s much better to follow the safe by design principle.
It’s not bad compared to some templating frameworks but having conditional if/not support is starting down the path of building a bad language.
It has no unnecessary features like
Template caching - which exchanges speed for memory usage and adds complexity. This is premature optimization. The simpler library will be faster by design.
There are no fancy callback features to tempt developers to write complicated code. It’s only going to work with an array of data.
No if statements if data isn’t present - encouraging separation of concerns.