Don't know the current state, but for a while it was a lot faster to just replace the HTML source (innerHTML I think?) than to manipulate the DOM. Just the way the browsers were implemented. No idea if the situation has improved by now.
Either way, it looks to me like this approach has to manipulate HTML strings to find a {{tag}} like that. Which seems like it's a lot more work than this:
<div id='thingToReplaceWithData1234"></div>
and then adding a child text node or such to that element. Whether you do that via InnerHTML or CreateTextNode doesn't matter, either seems faster and easier to me than doing a string substitution.
But I don't know, I never really got the appeal of the framework of the week. If it helps write decent web sites, then I guess that's good, but I've noticed that simple sites now are ridiculously slow and I'm guessing this is the reason.
Do you build websites using echo, Response.Write or whatever your language of choice is?
The reason people use templating languages client-side are exactly the same as they use them server-side, it's much easier to maintain a larger app.
Most template languages are extremely lightweight and blazingly fast, slow websites are 99% of the time due to sending too much content or slow server-side processing.
It seems faster, but unfortunately it isn't (or wasn't). That's just the thing. When I started, I also thought using DOM was a no-brainer, but there are all those tiny speed optimizations people make...
