Designer friendly views - simpler tags and .html files?

[eluser]tomdelonge[/eluser]
I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this. I've seen Dan Horrigan's "tags" library which looks neat. And I've seen Phil Sturgeon's template library, along with his way of implementing dwoo.

Is this the best route to go? What other methods do you guys use? Will using tags slow down rendering (It doesn't look like it creates compiled templates like dwoo/smarty, etc). Or if you use the tags library along with the template library and dwoo would this issue go away?

Basically I want to have view files stored in .html files. Simple looking tags, I'd prefer no dollar sign (I think "tags" would take care of this). Simple ways of importing common view parts, like a "header" or something. Simple just meaning looks nice, rather than

Code:

<?php include 'path/to/view.php';?>

or even

Code:

<?php $this->load->view('path/to/view');?>