"Broken" links inside a <template> tag - html

Question

I've recently started using the <template> tag for HTML that I process afterwards using a template library, e.g.
<template id="tmpl">
<div class="something">
{{title}}
</div>
</template>
...
<script>
var output = Mustache.render($('#tmpl').html(), {
link: 'abc',
title: 'abc'
});
</script>
However, I've come to realise this means I have a broken link (example.com/pages/{{link}}) in my HTML. This is a concern, as various crawlers might consider it invalid (in fact, the Google Search Console reports my homepage as having a broken link).
Is it valid to use <template> this way?
Is it better to put it in something like <script type="text/template"> instead (as seen on the handlebars.js website)?

Answer 1

The output variable does contain the HTML we would expect, i.e., the rendered template; however, your code does not write the contents of the output variable anywhere.
Here is a working example:
<template id="tmpl">
<div class="something">
{{title}}
</div>
</template>
<span id="output"></span>
<script>
var output = Mustache.render($('#tmpl').html(), {
link: 'abc',
title: 'abc'
});
$('#output').html(output);
</script>
Google has not properly crawled the test site I setup for this. However, when I asked GoogleBot to render my version of your code it displayed the link inside the template element, i.e., *{{title}}* and the rendered template link, i.e., *abc*. Even though Google says you have a broken link in the template element, you really don't when a user views it.
One possible way to get Google to quit indicating that you have a broken link is to surround your template tags with <!--googleoff: anchor--> ...templates... <!--googleon: anchor-->. These tags stop googlebot from indexing anchor tags contained within.
Example:
<!--googleoff: anchor-->
<template id="tmpl">
<div class="something">
{{title}}
</div>
</template>
<!--googleon: anchor-->