Wrapping templates in <template>-tags instead of <script type="text/html">-tags does not work in Internet Explorer 8 and 9.
Supporting IE 8 and 9 in your knockout project forces you to use <script>-tags to wrap your templates. Using <template>-tags leads to these templates being evaluated at page load rather than when the template is being instantiated at run-time - which ofc leads to the bindings within the template failing because in most cases there will not yet be data/the objects being used available.