You may take a look of Perlet Engine. The ideas are simple:

• output not HTML string but the DOM structure in the form of LOL (list of lists). It is serialized in HTML at the top level only.
• use subs instead of scripts. There must be only one script on your site: http sever itself.

A design like this seems to be very flexible and clean.

And yes, I know that the serialization procedure is slow -- now I rewrite it with XS.

Thank you for your comments.