Hello,

 I created a jsFiddle demo which shows the difference in the generated code:

 
By default a with(data) block is created which allows the developer to use only the field name in the template expressions:   "#= foo# instead of "#= data.foo#". The with block removes the hassle to type in "data." every time but would cause a performance decrease if the template is used a lot (a few hundred times).

Regards,
Atanas Korchev
the Telerik team

Makes sense. Thanks for the quick response.

Great question and equally good response.

Is there a way to set the template to disable useWithBlock outside of javascript?

I would like to do something like 
<script type="text/x-kendo-template" id="sampleTemplate" data-use-with-block="false">
 #: data.someValue #
</script>

or perhaps with 1 line of javascript make it so templates default to useWithBlock  set to false instead of true, instead of being forced to write javascript to do:

var tmp = kendo.template($("#sampleTemplate").html(), { useWithBlock: false});

Hello David,

 There is an undocumented way to globally set the useWithBlock setting. However this may break some widgets. Still you can try it to see if it would work in your case. Here is a demo showing how to do that: http://jsbin.com/evicef/1/edit

Regards,
Atanas Korchev
the Telerik team