I found a paper called Enforcing Strict Model-View Separation in Template Engines (via Chris Dent) which seems to back up the belief I mentioned here regarding the desire to seperate out your javascript from your page. Take a JSP example. The jsp file itself becomes the template and should be full of holes that information is stuffed into, javascript functions / methods are called to do magic, and finally CSS is applied to the jsp tp make it look pretty. Everything is nicely segregated and bound together with the loosest of ropes.

I just wish the paper would be updated to use HTML that would survive a parsing into a DOM tree.