Question

How do I use some dom as a template, so something like

<div>
    <span> v1 </span>
    <span> v2 </span>
    <span> v3 </span>
</div>

and then programmatically replace v1-v3 with some values (that i get off an xhr repsonse)

Answer 1

You can simply store it as a string, then drop it in a jQuery object whenever you need a new copy.

Once it is part of a jQuery object, you can traverse it just like it was already in the DOM, and update its content.

Something like this: http://jsfiddle.net/bZz96/

var div_template = "<div><span> v1 </span><span> v2 </span><span> v3 </span></div>";

$(div_template).find('span')
    .text( function(i) { return 'some new value ' + i; } )
    .end().appendTo('body');