Yes it would. Providing you wanted to setup live-binding.
If you do as you show above live-binding will be enabled. What that means is that whenever the value of the "foo" property changes (as long as it was changed using .attr( "foo", SOME_NEW_VALUE" ), then the value displayed in the DOM will automagically be updated. It's a amazing feature.
You can just do:
- <%= model.foo %>
But then you won't get live-binding.
The choice is yours...