Handlebars.js vs XSLT in-browser implementation

Handlebars is available as a JavaScript library, a Django module as well as Java, Ruby, Scala, .Net & PHP libraries, which means you can use it for frontend and backend templating in the language of your choice.

Handlebars's syntax is very readable and easy to understand.

If something is not within {{ and }}, it's not Handlebars. As a result, Handlebars "weaves" through HTML, instead of trying to become an invalid extension of it.

Examples for Bootstrap or other CSS frameworks are always in HTML. With Handlebards you can just copy and paste the examples in your code. With something like Pug (Jade) you have to convert the HTML to Pug (Jade) first.

The syntax allows the output to be any text and does not contrain the user to HTML output only. There are examples of handlebars being used to produce SQL, javascript and other programming language code.

Templates may be nested and reusable parts can be factored out.

Handlebars.js allows you to pre-compile your templates so that the loading time at the client end could be reduced when your templated page is loaded.

You can import Mustache templates and add extra functionality, that's provided by Handlebars, on top of them.

By design, logic-less templates force you to separate concerns thus helping you avoid future problems with refactoring. It also allow templates to be used with multiple programming languages without changes.

With Handlebars.js you can create bindings with variables inside any path in your application.

With a few lines of code, a new extension (control or templating function) can be implemented. It will be called by the compiled templates.

I.e. apply one template on top of another.

With ability to split feature implementation apart from main codebase, development became quite more manageable. Example: for data of particular type you could define own rendering or render refine rules; pipelining allows incrementally change UI by adding/removing elements depend of parameters, data values, previously rendered content.

Only template engine which utilizes multithreading.

In some browsers(IE) XSLT during load is compiled into DLL. In others pre-loaded template allows to skip recurring parsing .

XML when stored, saved outside of JS heap, capable to work with amount of data 100x larger of JSON.

Supported in all browsers, starting from IE5.

XSLT is available as in browser as on server side via various libs including highly optimized for CPU.