Just wanted to point out that John's original prototype doesn't actually require any changes in order to enable features like partials (nested templates) or counting iterators.  I was able to <a href="http://forum.jquery.com/topic/templating-syntax#14737000000923323" rel="nofollow">plug those features in through John's tmplcmd interface.</a>

The tmplcmd's themselves are discreet one or two line decorators that aren't tightly coupled with the core tmpl engine.  I prefer that approach, since it keeps specific use cases out of the general templating engine.

When I looked at the Microsoft approach, there were a number of added dependencies that just wouldn't be useful 80% of the time.  The additional API for event-binding, prerendering and postrendering seemed overly complex too, especially in a world with jQuery delegate().