This matches the way I was reading these 3 lines of code.
Is using an &lt;i&gt; tag here really intended? Did you mean &lt;img&gt;? Or did you mean to include the nick inside the <i> tag?

What makes this 'basic jQuery stuff' more desirable than:
```
this.$el.innerHtml =
  '<a href="#call/' + nick + '"><i class="icon-user">' + nick + '</a>';
```
The jQuery version is longer, hard to read (and it seems I'm not the only one thinking that), and I doubt it performs better (several DOM manipulations instead of one).