Question

Recently I’ve been exploring Backbone, and they do encourage using a template engine.

Now, I’ve got a bunch of html files that I want to display using that, and I will most likely have to edit them often in the development stage. The most tutorials I read recomment something like this:

<script type="text/template" id="template1">
    <ul>
        <li>Hic sunt dracones</li>
    </ul>
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    template = $('#template1').html();
<script>

So I’d like to know if this can be made to work with the src-attribute to include the template files. Or, if not, what is the usual approach to load template files?

Answer 1

Using src for this is not possible.
You could include a JavaScript file though which is generated on the server from separate template files; with PHP it could be as simple as this:

<?php
$templates = array(
    'foo' => file_get_contents('foo.html'),
    'bar' => file_get_contents('bar.html'),
);
header('Content-type: text/javascript');
echo 'var templates = ' . json_encode($templates);
?>

Loading this file with a <script> tag then gives you an object templates where you can acccess the various templates via templates.foo, templates.bar, etc.