oh well, let's say you have a function that generates the newest articles or something. I use li's for that kind of stuff...and if you want to style it, adding a class would be nice, so you get
<li class="topArticle"><a href="$articleurl">$articlename</a></li>
you need to do this kind of things with or without templating file no?

That's 4 double quotes that need to be escaped, and I have using single quotes in my html (i think it's even invalid for xhtml).

I could be wrong though :p