The difference in what? TBH I don't get the purpose either. You have to use javascript either way, and it's trivial to do make a shorthand for `document.createElement` that sets properties and adds children... maybe 10 lines per project.

I thought it was an optimization, but benchmarking `document.createElement` was significantly faster (firefox).

And then having `template` in your html means that changes to the template/use are less local.

I feel like this is an improvement that only makes sense if you're neck deep in the react world.

The React world is still deep in `document.createElement` and doesn't seem to be investing in the template tag any time soon.

I don't know what your benchmarks were exactly, but my benchmarking (also primarily in firefox) shows cloning templates is much faster than `document.createElement` for many tree shapes I was encountering. (Not micro-benchmarks of one element or so at a time, but the tree contents of entire components and "pages" at a time.) That's before learning of a performance tweak I'd missed from reading this thread today (`document.importNode` for template contents cloning to avoid multiple tree walking passes to attach the clone to the document).