They mention HTMLBars in passing, but mostly emphasize the fact that support for the current Handlebars syntax won't go away in 2.x. Three cheers for JavaScript frameworks with reasonable attitudes toward backwards-compatibility (!)... but as someone who HATES the current Handlebars syntax, I'm wondering if they've also committed to having HTMLBars fully ready-to-go at 2.0's launch? I know that "pieces of it are in place" in the beta right now, but will 2.0's date depend on it being fully ready?
We've started using the term HTMLBars to mean a collection of changes to the Ember rendering pipeline. In the current release (1.8) we've added metal-views (a renderer refactor), in the next release (1.9) we will be adding Streams (a data-binding refactor), and in 1.10 we hope to land parts of the new syntax and the DOM-based templating engine.
We've worked very hard to make HTLMBars an incremental release, and not a Big Bang rewrite. Partially because of this, it has taken longer to ship than was planned. However I'm personally very happy about how smoothly the transition is going thus far, and if you are a user of Ember.js I think you should feel the same way. :-D
HTMLbars will land well before 2.0, most likely in the next release. We've been doing the integration piecemeal to ensure that we don't break production apps; we want everyone to get to experience the new awesome.
It's worth noting that the very next release (1.9) is already locked and loaded (it branched to beta). So when Tom says "next release" he means 1.10.
Also, some of the points in the RFC are features that depend on the new templating engine but will likely not land in 1.10. We give guesstimates for when we think things will land in the RFC :)
