Much further after that, there was a jQuery plugin called taconite that let you do this from arbitrary languages. The idea was that you can handle all of your templating server side and build the template into a simple xml document that had tags corresponding to jquery dom manipulation functions. You return the template with the right mimetype, and the plugin handles translating your xml template into a dom update. This has been handy a few times to keep all of the display logic centralized in a single templating mechanism.