Well, you probably are doing it wrong. jQuery’s html function is a very nice way to replace the contents of an element with new contents. Its usefulness is supposedly limited, though, according to the API documentation for this method. Every day jQuery users use this powerful method in a way that it was never meant to be used, and it works, but does that mean we should still do it?
In Backbone.js, rendering views is really simple, yet not so much. It’s simple because Backbone doesn’t force you into doing it any specific way, so you have freedom to just use a bit of jQuery and dump the HTML into an element. Then again, since it doesn’t implement anything on its own, we’re stuck writing our own implementations, making it more difficult than it could otherwise be. In the case of rendering subviews, things can definitely get a little more difficult.