Thanks for the various comments above. 

To give a bit of context, this is a fork of John's prototype, which we have been using to explore some scenarios. It is currently pretty much in flux, so we haven't been drawing attention to it up to now, or providing API documentation. But quite a few of the recent changes are actually a result of input from John, following his review of where we were at a couple of weeks ago. 

As to the set of features, nothing is decided yet - we are aiming at splitting it into a set of more important features (currently jquery.tmpl.js) and some additional features in a separate plugin (jquery.tmplplus.js). But which parts go in which is under discussion with John, and things could move in either direction. 

There is quite a lot that was not at all in John's original prototype, including composition through the {{tmpl}} tag (partials), being able to get to the template context (which provides access to the data item, the HTML nodes, the parent context - for nested templates, etc.), improved support for passing parameters to tags in markup, and so on. Take a look at the sample demos, including the movies demo, to get a sense of some of the features that are currently in there. 

On the documentation, we will add a Wiki to the github repo very soon, and also try to add more demos as we move along...

Absolutely agree about being able to use external/remote templates, and that is on the roadmap, though some workarounds are already available.