I agree that putting all that logic and template vars into a template is confusing. Hard to create mocks of what the HTML should actually be structured like.

I agree that putting all that logic and template vars into a template is confusing. Hard to create mocks of what the HTML should actually be structured like. Im using Jade so I can be terse and pre-compiling the templates. While in my Backbone application, I apply DOM-like rendering with Plates.js.