All the Templating You Need

function replicate(items, template, defaults) {
    var indices = {};
    var i=0, item;

    // build direct map of column names -> row index
    while ((item = data.columns[i])) indices[item] = i++;

    return data.rows.map(function (row) {
            return template.replace(/__\$\{(.+?)\}__/g, function (str, keyword) {
                return (keyword in indices)? row[indices[keyword]] : '';
                });
            }).join('\n');
}

var data = {
    'columns': ['adj', 'noun'],
    'rows': [
        ['main', 'man'],
    ['leading', 'lady'],
    ['green', 'dreams']
        ]
};

var template = '<p>__${adj}__ __${noun}__</p>';
replicate(data, template);

Peter Michaux has some nice ideas about keeping the JSON format DRY, so that data returned resembles something more like a list of Python tuples. (Python is also probably the single language that helped me to understand efficient JavaScript patterns.)

Client-side transforms - converting an XML or JSON response into HTML on the client, to save server bandwidth and processing time - are a key part of modern web apps, but I'm not sure about a transform system that implements full-blown JavaScript logic. Branching or looping can be implemented easily in transforming functions; several templates can be used and plugged in to each other, leading to nested data structures in the response. (Hopefully, time permitting, I'll get to demonstrate how that works soon.)

innerHTML may not be a part of any standard, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be. Sometimes we need to interact with the DOM as a tree, sometimes it's more useful to unleash JavaScript's string parsing and regex power on it.