Yes, Genshi does support text-based templating, and I have used it for JavaScript generation (i know this sounds insane). However, it requires you to learn a new set of syntax, and I am unsure of the performance. TG supports Genshi out of the box, and I am hoping that either chameleon.genshi will help the performance issues it has, or mako will become the default. Mako is 10x as fast as Genshi. Jinja2 also has similar performance to Mako, and is supported by TG2 in non-dotted template form. (Contributions welcome!)

Also, I wanted to mention that I started a project called Strainer with Tom Lynn, which does xhtml validation. I am going to release a piece of middleware in this package that you can stuff into the stack if you are using mako in development and want to ensure that your pages are generated using valid xhtml. For now, it’s mainly a testing tool: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/strainer/0.1a2

Great write up, I feel very much the same way about the TG stack. One minor correction, though: Genshi supports text-based templating as well as xml-based, something which isn’t obvious when you praise the non-xml approach of Mako.