I've been working very hard to advance John's vision because it fits very well with my personal needs, and more importantly, I've been able to convince myself that its a great approach to templating. In general I've done very little to change it. Here is what I did to change the basic implementation (it is still basically the same size):
1) generated templates are smaller and faster and actually readable.
2) templates can be generated at the command line from the html that uses them.
3) added elseif
4) support for async/sync loading of remote templates
5) added comments (thanks richard et al)
6) allow extra white space in tags (thanks borgar)
7) extra example
8) tag syntax can be easily changed
9) plugin architecture for tags and template evaluation filters
10) plugin tags for extend/include, block, switch/case/default, lorem and more
11) plugin filters via jquery collections (for those familiar w/ ariel fleslers collections plugin)
12) uninvasive error handling
13) debugging support
and more.
What I'm hoping is that if folks visit my branch at
http://github.com/thatcher that the jquery-team will make this the next starting point.
Thanks
Thatcher