I've read the AngularJS documentation on the topic carefully, and then fiddled around with a directive. Here's the fiddle. And here are some relevant snippets: From the HTML: <pane bi-title="title" title="{{title}}">{{text}}</pane> From the pane directive: scope: { biTitle: '=', title: '@', bar: '=' }, There are several things I don't get: Why do I have to use "{{title}}" with '@' and "title" with