> Is using an <i> tag here really intended?

It's the [bootstrap way for adding icons](http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/base-css.html#icons)

> The jQuery version is longer, hard to read

Really matter of taste, mostly depending on how much used you are to jQuery. Of course the `innerHTML`version is shorter here, I was just supposing we'll add other stuff to the user entry view later, and I can't really imagine to keep adding html semantics the string-concat way.

Actually, I don't either expect we keep avoiding using some externalized template engine on the long run, but that may be just me.