The view template is one of the inputs to the IKAT renderer, which is used as its "model" for the output file it is to produce. The view template is the main source of actual tags in the target XML dialect, the only other source being the small ComponentRenderer and StaticComponentRenderer objects stored within the RenderSystem for that dialect. No mention, for example, of HTML tags should appear anywhere else in an RSF application.

The only addition made to the view template in terms of the target XML dialect is the rsf:id attribute, which is applied to tags which will be expected to peer with a UIComponent supplied by the ComponentProducer. These components form part of the view tree, the second major input to the IKAT renderer. The process of rendering involves "weaving together" these two inputs, alternating between template-driven iteration and component-driven iteration during the generation of the rendered output.

A section of a sample XHTML view template is shown here:

  <table rsf:id="message-row:" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
    <tr>
      <td class="vertical-thing-class" rsf:id="tmiblock:2"> <img
                  src="../images/threaded-indent-2.png" alt=""
                  rsf:id="scr=rewrite-url"/>
      </td>
      <td width="70%" class="message-body"> 
         <div rsf:id="message-pane:">To be
           clear, Mozilla will not display the ]&gt; if the document is served as
          ...

This shows a variety of HTML and RSF constructs. The most important distinction is between rsf:id values which contain colons, and those which do not. As explained in the section on IDs, an ID value containing a colon will peer with a UIContainer[1] component representing a "branch point" of the IKAT rendering algorithm, whereas an ID with no colon will peer with a non-container UIComponent instance, representing a leaf of the component tree.

The only other class of rsf:id are those containing an equals sign =, such as "scr=rewrite-url" above. Currently the only text allowed to appear before = is scr, standing for StaticComponentRenderer, an interface expressing a template rewrite rule that acts on a template tag without any component peer.