Having become somewhat fed up with the Template Toolkit, built on Perl, I decided to create my own HTML/XML template system with the help of XOTcl. It takes a rather different approach to how to create templates, totally separating the actual HTML from the code that defines the contents.
It's simple and easy, and there are things missing from it, but the model is something I'm pretty keen to explore further. Not an actual release, but you can fetch it to play around with it.
Some more information plus a rant against Template Toolkit (and similar HTML template systems) at: