Have you checked out Tenjin? http://www.kuwata-lab.com/tenjin/

It's the fastest template engine there is, written in pure python. It's HTML compliant, but still gives you full access to python.

FYI - Mako's advantage is its speed. It's quite a bit faster than Django if you tell it to cache it's generated templates as compiled python. Also, Mako gives you access to all of python as well. Django does not.