2x-3x is negligable when the overall time taken to build a 50x50 table is 30ms. I don't really care if it's 30ms or 60ms. Either is fast enough unless you're doing crazy masses of DOM manipulation.

I wasn't kidding in the least about IE. IE is a small minority on my webapp, thank goodness. If they get a degraded user experience, then that's MS's problem to fix.

"fast, predictable, readable, and one line" I guess you haven't got into all the issues with innerHTML. Tables, event handlers being borked, etc etc. html entities are ugly and have no place in code IMHO.

I guess some of it also comes down to the fact of mixing languages. I'd much rather write javascript in a single file. Having HTML fragments dotted around the place is, in my view, very very ugly.