I'm looking for a small templating JS library to replace a variety of jQuery, underscore.js and explicit HTML construction. We frequently end up adding a large library to perform a couple of basic tasks. underscore.js is actually a pretty good fallback, but I thought there may be other options which do less.
I've used with pleasure Ractivejs. To quote their website
About Ractive.js
Ractive was originally created at theguardian.com to produce news applications. A typical news app is heavily interactive, combines HTML and SVG, and is developed under extreme deadline pressure. It has to work reliably across browsers, and perform well even on mobile devices.
Many tools exist to help you build web apps, but very few deal with the fundamental problem: HTML, while excellent at describing static documents, wasn't designed for interactivity. Ractive changes that. It takes your Mustache templates and transforms them into a lightweight representation of the DOM – then when your data changes, it intelligently updates the real DOM.
The best way to understand how Ractive will make your life as a web developer easier is to see the examples, try the 60 second setup, and follow the interactive tutorials.
