I was wondering about this if people have strong opinions about the best way to generate HTML on the fly, especially with Ajax based applications.
Do you just create the HTML code using server side scripting and then send it out to the page or perhaps just return a JSON string and let Javascript do the job.
In my personal opinion, the first way ties the presentation layer way too much to the logic and makes it harder to change and a nightmare to maintain. The second way, although is my preferred method, also becomes a nightmare to maintain when the complexity of the project grows.
I was thinking of using a Javascript templating system as another layer, just to make the code more robust and less rigid. Anyone has good ideas of a light and really good JS templating system?
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/ is a devilishly brilliant hack for this. End result is very clean.