I tried moving some html that didn’t have a direct relation to the meaning of my content, but more with layout aspect, to the client-side by writing a jQuery plugin for it. This in order to heighten the separation of concerns. The plugin performs some DOM manipulation in order to apply a drop shadow effect as seen in the following image (left side without plugin applied, right side with):

To accomplish this the crucial part of the plugin performs the following DOM manipulation:
elementToWrap.html( '<div class="frame" style="width: 157px;">' + elementToWrap.html() + '<div class="right_shadow">' + '<div class="shadow_top_right"></div>' + '<div class="shadow_right" style="height: 93px;"></div>' + '</div>' + '<div class="bottom_shadow">' '<div class="shadow_bottom_left"></div>' + '<div class="shadow_bottom" style="width: 143px;"></div>' + '<div class="shadow_bottom_right"></div>' + '</div>' + '</div>' );