Can Component not have a template？

In some scenes, maybe one model needs to have several children models in its scope because childs need to share data and methods of their parent midel, like below.

<div id="parent">
    <!-- model parent -->
    <div id="child1">
        <!-- model child1 -->
    </div>
    <div id="child2">
        <!-- model child2 -->
    </div>
        ...
</div>

I have tried the simplest way, but it didn’t work. There is one effective model, the parent.

var parent=new Vue({
    el:'#parent',
...
});
var child1=new Vue({
    el:'#child1',
...
});
..

Then I thought components should be used. But I didn’t want to make a component, but a thing like controller in angular. Can I just do this?

Vue.component('child1',{
    inherit:true,
    el:'#child',
    ...
});

or like below?

var child1=parent.$addChild({
    inherit:true,
    el:'#child1',
    ...
});

Vue is awesome, but components may be too heavy for such scenes I have mentioned. By the way, it seems that chrome app doesn’t support component system, it give an error like this:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property '$before' of undefined  vue.min.js:7

[yyx990803]

inline-template now in dev: https://github.com/yyx990803/vue/commit/bd47f1c71e9826f6e42cb9056829f58cc7681c05

[yyx990803]

Just a random idea, maybe an attribute flag, e.g. <div v-component="x" inline-template>, which indicates that you don’t want content transclusion for what’s inside the component?