I am a web guy doing mostly Perl server-side stuff, and I\'m slowly coming to a few conclusions.
The 2 libs I know that do not mix template coding with HTML markups are chain.js and PURE
chain makes only DOM manipulations.
PURE uses a mix of DOM and innerHTML as the DOM alone can be slow to render bigger templates.
I'm the main contributor of PURE, and we created it to build a web app on the ajax model you describe.