Is it a bad practice to have backbone views which do not depend on any kind of templating system?
Of course, this does not mean that any kind of DOM code will be generated by hand, using hardcoded strings within the views. No no no. I can of course cache the basic layout for each view in DOM elements, set to display:none. However, I want to reduce any kind of value setting within the templates themselves. I’d rather do that using jquery, or any other kind of DOM modifier form within the view itself. This way I save myself the constant discrepancies and the countless hours of efforts that I’ve exposed my apps and myself to, using Mustache, Handelbars, the Underscore templating system, etc. Having all the view logic in one place makes everything much cleaner, at least in my view. It gives a lot of benefits, such as proper partial rendering, value binding, etc, that I’d need tons of days to spend on if I wanted to implement them with mustache or something.
The only problem that I see might occur is whether the constant checks that I’d do with jQuery will be performing fast enough, but I guess that it shouldn’t be such a problem at the end.
What do you think? Good? Bad? Practical?
IMHO not using a template engine is not, per-se, a bad design decision.
Template engines are meant to produce cleaner and more maintainable code, if you think not using them produces cleaner and more maintainable code them you can run without them.
I my opinion is better to use template engines but this is just a matter of taste. I also combine the templates with manual DOM modifications through
this.$el.find(".my-element").html( "new value" );for partial updates.