I agree that templating is very fast and efficient, probably faster than serializing to JSON.
Read the OP's posts - he is talking about a "server" being an embedded device with 64mb of read-only storage. My assumption is that the data output format is basically hard-coded in the device's OS and doesn't even rely on JSON serialization.
Oh wait, oh my god
> Three levels down and people have entirely forgotten what my post was.
I missed this reply entirely. Whoops.
That said, I do feel like you can do HTML templates on a tiny chip with 64 megs of memory. I've seen NASes with comparably tiny & terrible chips serve their web UIs this way: paper-thin html templates with <form>s for interactivity and <table>s for layout.