This post is by no means a tutorial, just chronocling my short adventure into HTML templates tonight.

I've just started playing around with HTML templates. It took me a small amount of searching for the right tutorials, but after a while I found a couple that when I combined them it all started worked together nicely. `

HandleBars is pretty simple to use. Stare at the documentation and syntax for a while, then realize that yes, if you want to do anything 'fancy' like if(a==b) that you'll need to write your own helper. But, if you're just looking for some simple and easy to use templating, it's great.

I knew from the start, that I wanted to include my templates from seperate files. It didn't make much sense to me to put the template directly into my source code files, since the only things I wanted to template for were items that would appear across multiple pages and it makes sense then to push the templates into their own files for that. So I decided to include jQuery into my project so I wouldn't spend a lot of time writing javascript ajax boilerplate code.

The .load() function turned out to be very useful. Since I could point it to a url and then simply use a callback function once it was done. After a few false starts (such as realizing that if(a==b) was beyond Handlebar's abilities) I got a template spitting information out onto the page.

From there, I moved the data itself into it's own file that I loaded again, with .load(). Figuring that if I make a backend API to power my small project I'm starting on, that abstracting the data into it's own areas accesible via URL now, will turn out to be good foresight later on.

We'll see what else comes of it. Oh, the best thing about HandleBar is that you can precompile your templates, which means that when you're creating dozens of templated items, that you can save yourself a good amount of processing time just by compiling early and not for each instance of your templated data.