Common approaches to using a HTML template are to:
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.