All criticism is good - just don't take what you see as negative personally otherwise this issue will consume you alive. If it is eating you up, then step back for a bit... let the debate continue in the community, and maybe even let someone else take the reins for a while.

For those purists that don't want to be fettered by the generated output of a CMS, then go back to hand-coding *yawn*. And as someone who's only now (12 months' in) cutting his teeth in the depths of Drupal, I still think it's been a really hard system to understand. But there is a huge reward for the persistent which offsets any issues about CSS or tables. Drupal has a long way to go to make it truly accessible, but I'm concerned that the reverence suddenly being paid to Designers since DCDC may well denigrate the tremendous amount of work that Developers have achieved to get Drupal where it is now. We need to keep things balanced and look at the bigger picture: Drupal is there to empower the ordinary person and give us all a voice.

Views is definitely an acquired taste; however, it's justified its place as one of the most popular and flexible modules and I couldn't work in Drupal without it.

Love you man. Etc.

Maybe I just don't see their point-- but the griping of the markup minimalists that drupal in general, or views in specific, is too bloated reminds me of newbies in the forums complaining about this or that missing feature. It's totally myopic and completely narcissistic.

No one system can be everything to everyone. Drupal strives to strike a balance between functionality and flexibility-- it's a tightrope walk at best, and imo drupal does a pretty dam good job at it. A fact that is reinforced by complaints from all sides-- if one side were too happy, it would signal drupal is leaning more one way then the other.

Personally, I just don't get it-- views markup is incredibly versatile. More often then not I can do what I need with some css tweaks here and there. If not, the awesome theming improvements of d6 make it short order to grab hold of the template and output whatever markup I want.

So where's the problem? My guess is that anyone who doesn't know who the "views developers" are either 1) doesn't want to be bothered redoing the markup to fit their minimalist preference or 2) doesn't know how. In any case, it wouldn't be someone I would pay much attention to.

I love you, man.

In my research for the latest Lullabot theming videos, I came across the Drupal Dojo presentation that you did on the Drupal 6 theming system. And I was struck with how much core work that you put in spurned from the limitations of Drupal 5 theming for Views, but also how much you've been driven by that work to help make Design in Drupal awesome. I think you said as much at some point in the video, but I think most people think of you as the Views guy, but don't know how much effort you've also put into helping clean up the Drupal 6 theme system.

So it's kind of ironic that as the design movement starts to catalyze, then there'd be some uninformed criticism from the HTML purists perspective on Views.

As someone who didn't know the first thing about Drupal theming before directing these latest training videos, I can say that the Theme Developer toolbar was essential for me in order to grok what's happening. Yes there are a ton of candidate template files, but it's just a result of of the flexibility.

Anyway, just as you hoped that your work on the core template system would spurn more beautiful design in Drupal, I'm hoping our latest videos will help people really grok how the theme system fully works so that they're not overwhelmed by the 'verbose' markup.

Oh... and love you man.

Hi Earl / Merlin,

Thanks so much for your work on Views and Panels.

I attended the D4D camp in Boston, and I think it was an important step forward in bringing design to be of equal importance to development within Drupal, and the Drupal community. However, I can understand your great concern about the many pointed comments that were made at D4D about the HTML output of the Views and Panels modules.

I am an "end user" of Drupal (for genomics research) and both design and development are important for me. I think it is critically important for Drupal to become stronger in the design area. However, it also is critically important for me to be able to use Views to easily generate complex SQL queries to present data and text in useful and visually pleasing ways. I do not expect Views to provide ultra clean HTML, or "pixel perfect" representations of the data and images displayed, which are exactly the points that you made in your recent post: Views, Panels, economy of front end code, and classes and namespace.

I think that several factors have come together to create a (hopefully temporary) negative situation for you as a result of the D4D discussions: first, I think that many of the designers who were at D4D are fairly new to Drupal, and to the code development world, and they have no idea how important and unique Views, and also Panels, are for Drupal, or how much work it has taken to create them.

Second, I think that the designers have always felt - and accurately so - that they have not been properly regarded as "first class citizens" within the Drupal community. This needs to be changed, and a major point of the D4D camp was to take steps to bring about this change. As an attendee of D4D, I had the sense that many of the developers felt like they were being given a real voice in the Drupal community for the first time, and some of them were very free in expressing their previous frustrations.

Third, I also had the impression that a number of the designers who were most vocal in their complaints happened to be rather strong-minded individuals with little experience in working in open source projects, or in the Drupal project in particular. Having participated in - and/or carefully watched - several other open source communities (Perl, Ruby on Rails, etc), I have seen first-hand the importance of maintaining a positive and constructive level of dialogue regarding problems that need to be addressed. I think that some of the comments made by designers at D4D were unnecessarily strong and negative, and would have been much more carefully worded if they had more experience working within the Drupal community.

Fourth - and quite relevant here - is that as essentially the sole author of the Views and Panels modules, you have felt personally attacked by some of the comments about those modules. This is extremely unfortunate, because it really reflects just how important those modules are - which is why they keep getting used - and how important your own personal contribution has been in this area. It is natural for you to feel personally offended by such pointed comments.

So, let me say again, in bold: Thanks so much for your work on Views and Panels.

I hope that you will continue to be motivated to work on Views and Panels, and that the developers and designers within the Drupal community can find a positive balance between constructive input, and appreciation for hard work by others.

Best regards,

Michael Caudy (mcaudy)

Guess im one of those who have been very vocal bout the output that comes out of drupal, and my sheer frustration of the "huge" amount of markup that drupal provides out of the box.
Just to be absolutely clear and that no one misunderstands this:
I dont have a problem with views is putting out loads lot of css classes and a lot of divs this is a very good thing its easy with css to identify each element. and this gives many the tool they needs to get their design going.

But as a über html nerd I wanna optimize my html down to as little as possible. so what should a aspiring markupmarine do?

* the wrong way:
bitch, moan and cry and demand that someone would change the markup that I dont understand why is so full of css classes (and I dont wanna learn or understand why it is as it is)
and off course do this personal to merlin cause he dont "understands" my needs

* the right way:
Go in and read the documentation - understand what it is views does,what it is that i dont need. find the templatefiles - then make new tpls that satisfies my needs for my optimized (but not as flexible) views output. and share it with the world: http://drupal.org/project/mothership

The sweet thing bout views it that it gives us the power to change the markup, will that someday probably come and bite me in the ass when theres an exception in a view - well im pretty sure there will, but then I hope someone figured that out and have reported the bug ;)

Since im one of the people who are powering the moment (they pointed to me http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffeaton/3623160520/) I better address your fear:
I dont think that its totally fair to say that we wanna remove all markup:
I wanna have both!
I want the totally flexible a ton of classes so you can identify anything you wanna.
AND
I want to have the ability to go minimal only a class when I really really (really) need it and yes make it not flexible at all.
Now i can cherry pick the solution i wanna have for my specific theme.

The movement - I hope will lead to getting more frontend geeks into drupal, and hopefully help out optimizing and working on the frontend of drupal.
Dont think theres a reason to be afaid that it will go the "wrong" way, we have the markupmarines to keep order of the troops ;)

btw hope you still like malty dark beers cause im piling up for paris - just to say thanks for the .tpl files and the improvements for us template lovers.

/mortendk

My personal fav beer - http://www.spatenusa.com/3_products/3_1_prod_spectrum/3_1_1_produkt/okto.... Weird web page imo, excellent beer. Just damn hard to find. /me needs to get some!

mortendk captures the spirit of boston d4d event very well. I did not at all sense any "we hate modules or devs" feeling - certainly not among anyone who knows anything about Drupal. jjeff did a great job at the very opening defining how drupal evolved since the beginning. What touched me was how he described the idealism of the drupal development community - it is a great tradition. I felt it was the perfect opening. The strongest sessions of the 2 day event were imo very much in that idealistic tradition. I sensed much more of that at d4d Boston than any misplaced negativity.

Regarding markup and themer ability to control markup - that was a strong discussion thread throughout no doubt about it. But the most exciting presentations - the ones that got some of the most twitter "action" were all themes or modules that _used_ the awesome theme layer of drupal to provide additional options to advanced folks who wanted it. mortendk's mothership, really a tour de force demonstration of how drupal _does_ give the themer incredible control, was followed with Studio theme which again _uses_ the awesome theme layer of drupal to attempt to increase the power of the theme layer and simplify the use of advanced functionality. And finally, skinr module which gave just a taste of how putting a smart UI in front of all that power can make that power even more accessible. It was fascinating to see how it captured the imagination of the audience.

You know that wasn't all. 960gs presented by Nathan and Todd - that took over the auditorium. A Views theming session that I didn't get to see, but which I heard excellent buzz about. Plenty of discussion about sustainable theming. And a personal favorite moment when johnvsc pretty much introduced his "everything you wanted to know about theming" presentation by going to api.drupal.org.

Anyway, that was my take on it. Only a fool doesn't understand the reason why Views has to work the way it does. And for anyone who doesn't get it yet - if you don't like Views markup, override it. That is the power drupal gives you. Maybe watch yourself though - that blade has two edges as I suspect mortendk would be the first to admit.

Peace and Love...

I have so far been grateful (and foresee no reason that will change) that Views has provided so many CSS tags that I can find in Firebug, allowing me to theme so many things quickly and granularly. I've never had to build a Drupal site for which every last byte of page size is so important.

Earl, since you work on Sony sites (or at least for Sony, right?), surely you are involved with some sites that require svelt code. Do you (or does Sony) go in and trim off their unused Views generated CSS tags? or rename things? or is everyone happy?

What if Views stored every single Views tag it generates in individual fields so that the tag names could be edited in the View UI or the tags could be deleted? I suppose that would cause a lot more database overhead? or this could be cached? or would this solution be more trouble than it is worth (considering there is already a solution)?

As the web speeds up more and more and web pages become heavier and heavier (javascript, java, flash, multimedia, etc), the bytes consumed by the CSS become a smaller and smaller percentage of the whole. Surely, optimization time can in most cases then be more productively spent on those more expensive elements?

one last question to the designers: why should anyone particularly care about the aesthetics of the resulting html/css? If you know html/css (and especially if you have firebug), then this stuff is easy to read and to modify no matter what. It's not rocket science. it's not even programming. it's just matching up pairs of tags. pages are meant to be rendered, not to be read. That's my perspective so I'd like to understand what others may think.

First of all, yeah, thank you :)

Second, I gave a presentation at D4D on Saturday that pretty much said: "Hey, there is tons of documentation at api.drupal.org if you know how to use it!" This refers the the "right way" above. That said: Views is an excellent example of great documentation. When I enabled Views 2 for the first time, my first reaction was, "Whoa, let me get my self a drink before I tackle this."

Now it is second nature: theme a view? No freaking problem :) Drupal has a steep learning curve; know, i am reminded every day at work!

Part of the reason why it is no freaking problem is because of all those damn div tags in there anyway (although, man what the hell is up with the double dashes !?! Sorry, couldn't resist).

And if someone needs help with views, there are tons of people in the IRC who can clear things up a bit. (and all the designer whine ... "NOT THE IRC?"

tpl's forEVAH
johnvsc

Contrib modules like views must strike a very delicate balance between providing enough functionality to work "out-of-the-box" with enough flexibility to please [almost] everyone. Touching on what Kent brought up earlier, the new theming system in Drupal 6 make this much easier for the module developers, but unfortunately has left many seasoned themers feeling confused. While the idea of a tpl file is not new, the concept of template suggestions beyond the basic node-type.tpl.php is a hard one to grasp. Tools like the Views 2 "Theme information" pane, and the Theme Developer module can help to show all possible template candidates, but its been my experience that very few people use these tools to their fullest potential.

So here's my go at helping out, How to theme a CCK field using a content-field template, rather than doing it in the node template.
http://zroger.com/node/25

I spoke at D4D. I co-presented on the NineSixty theme with Todd from Four Kitchens. One of the points I made was that I am used to having argue markup and "semantics" vs. HTML purists who yell at me about the 960 Grid System. To me, the answer is simple: "It takes less energy not to use it, than to complain about it."

Anyway, as a Drupal n00b, but someone who considers himself a (somewhat) capable front-end developer / designer, I have to say that at the end of the day my work is mostly about pragmatism. I strive for lean HTML because it makes my life easier, but if I'm using a module written by someone else, I'm willing to learn / conform / adapt, because usually it's giving me a leg-up where I would not have otherwise been able to produce that functionality on my own.

So, for what it's worth, keep up the good fight, keep writing code for the masses, and let the naysayers endeavor to do any better. It's often those not willing to put in the hard work who just whine about things not being just-so. Those veterans who have gone through the "school of hard knocks" as designers / front-end developers quickly realize that the web (particularly open source) is all about symbiosis.

Though I am just getting into Drupal, it is *because* (not in spite) of people like you. Much obliged, for putting in the countless (thankless) hours making the system so extensible.

Hi.

I was fortunate to be able to attend d4d and I did not pick up on any anti-Views sentiment. Look at it this way, if a decent developer wanted to circumvent Views and write their own querys, they probably could. A decent designer probably can't. Artsy-fartsy folks like myself use Views and love Views.

What I did hear is,

"When I create a template, I want to do so to change the structure of the markup, not to add a class."

I think this is valid and it certainly appears that efforts including Studio and Skinr are addressing this.

Before I chose Drupal, one of my "tests" was to right click and take a look at the code which was coming out. Drupal (with Views) is much, much cleaner than many platforms; that's because (I'm guessing) developers were working hard to make it clean. Drupal needs designers who share this vision.

Some time ago I received an e-mail from a designer. I had told him his design was strong but his code was weak. He replied:

"I tried pure div based layouts years ago and abandoned the effort in frustration because of browsers didn't support the standards. And div based approaches just couldn't make our layouts work...If you want to limit your design ideas to what works with divs, fine, but I don't think that's necessarily the better option...tables have worked for a long time...And "valid" is more of semantic game at this point."

He is not part of the Drupal project, and I'm glad that type of (common) attitude does not prevail in our project. The Drupal project wants designers who value clean code, even if the dreams we dream are not always obtainable.

-NP

because for each non respectful comment on your work there are hundreds of quiet people who do love your work.

Anyone who thinks that Views creates bad HTML should look at most "easy site" development packages. Or what comes from Microsoft Office products. The main thing that's important is whether or not it works. The second important factor is do the search engines "like" it. My first two examples cannot reply "yes" to both; Views can.

Coming from a "bit tweaking" background and history, there are things I don't like to see (lots of extraneous spaces for one). But I keep going back to those two questions as a litmus test. Drupal in general and Views in particular pass those tests, so I scroll the page and try to ignore it.

In my view, the markup component of page weight is not totally unimportant, just fairly trivial for pages viewed with a web browser. If a page contains hi-tech features like images, odds are that those are eating a lot more bandwidth than div tags.

As a dyed in the wool empiricist, I work for results. I don't build sites to look good in telnet. I am much more concerned with non-validating code that I am with moderately verbose code.

A lot of my sites, particularly sites for large working meetings, are heavily views dependent. These sites are designed by a print design team who wants what they want, with no negotiation. Views 1 was a revelation that enabled a lot of this work, but to realize the graphical result in a sane amount of time, I had to rewrite views output using a lot of jQuery. Views 2 was a gift. Not that I don't like jQuery, just that the time to produce and theme these views went down by about 85 percent and page load times are actually faster.

Views and panels do amazing powerful things. I for one am a happier person because they exist.

I am not a PHP or Drupal developer and so I cannot create what Views already does.

I would have to learn how to write code to do what Views does (but I don't want to because I think Views is fantastic.)

Hence Views allows me to save days if not weeks of time in creating a database driven web site. And I have plans to create numerous web sites and so Views will save me hundreds of hours in the long run.

I am extremely grateful that you have created Views. From the first time I started to use it, I was extremely impressed with how powerful it is, how flexible it is.

I am sure there are hundreds of people like me who need to use Drupal and CCK and Views to achieve their objectives, because they do not have the expertise to do it themselves.

Time is our greatest resource and it is limited. You have given many people more of this precious resource by allowing them to save hundreds of hours.

So you have given many more hours to enjoy their lives, you have provided them with an excellent product, and many users of websites will and do benefit from using Views.

You should be very proud of what you have given people.

leisa.reichelt made some observation with regards to Views which are not true and may be confusing - http://www.disambiguity.com/why-drupal-needs-a-design-community-manager/.... Since the comment has not yet appeared there and I have no idea if it ever will I will keep a note here.

While any unfair or groundless comments by newbie can be accepted to some extent it hurts when so called learned tech people, designers or programmers, make baseless observations.

The words in quote are by leisa.reichelt.
I have replied to those and I needed to say those.

“a) define who Views if for - who do we *want* to be able to use it? Do we want a relative newcomer but someone who understands basic database functionality to be able to use it? ”

As a newcomer I found it USEFUL, EASY and HELPFUL, && as I grew more with Drupal I find Views USEFUL, EASY and HELPFUL. Views is for BOTH.

“b) do some testing - it doesn’t need to be fancy lab based testing, let’s just get a few of us out to do a few test sessions each and watch these people using it”

If you follow the Drupal.org forums these test is being done by all levels of people all the time 24×7x365. Read their feedbacks, problems, issues - that is the real test. Any other tests = bogus!

“c) design some alternatives and re-test (as above).”

Views 2 has been alternative to Views 1 and a pleasant one. And useful too. Views 3 roadmap shows it is proceeding in the right path.

“let’s talk more about this elsewhere if you’re interested.”

Talk in drupal.org forums. Nice and useful place. No need to go elsewhere and split the community!

Thought I'd chime in here, wish I'd found this sooner. I work with Views a lot, and have developed a few extra modules and bits of code, and templating, to work with it, and I have tried to give the views community feedback that I thought was constructive, and merlin flipped out at me for criticizing him and my choice of descriptive words.
It got a little personal, and frankly I wasn't expecting it from what I had said. I don't think there is anything wrong with someone studying your work and having an opinion - nobody wants to insult you - no matter how they might describe some small part of the Views module, they only put time into writing because they care about the project, even if they aren't aware of exactly who is behind the project. I now know merlin is founder and maintainer, but it does seem reasonable to consider Views a community project as there are a lot of stakeholders, and a lot of the development stems from community input anyway. So when people say the "Views authors" I think it is a clear indication that it is not a personal attack.
When I criticize an artist or technician it is not an invitation for them to get mad at me, but an opportunity to collaborate and perfect something. Often a maintainer of a project has a skewed perception of the people using the module as they only bother you when they have a problem they cannot solve. It is difficult to keep in mind that if we hated it so much we wouldn't use it at all.

I see the point in having lots of div nesting making sense as you can most theme anything.
I also see a problem as you programatically nest things they create their own container and it is probably not easy keeping the nesting at a low level.

Still I am a CSS person, and the Nesting Level drupal actually delivers is sheer madness to anyone coming in from the outside.

So - what can be done to allow for ways of reducing it? So every element gets one div instead of two or three?

Getting up on the barricades on both sides of the fence won't help. The Reason the d4d people complain is: We want to encourage designers to theme drupal and make themes for Drupal. How can we force as little as possible System-specific Lingo on them?

Sometimes you spend quite some time opening more and more divs in Firebug till you finally found the right one. The only way to effectively influence this I know at the moment is to make extensive use of templating (views theming). So probably both sides of this debate must come down and try to come to constructive measueres. This would mean to the designers: yes, if you want it different, supply patches. This is the currency that makes the drupal market go round. And to merlin to review and consider them with a loving eye... So Morten: patching party ahead.

Hey ho, let's go

This may be an old thread, but I found it and read it anyway. After you read all this, it's Divicult(new word) to keep one's mouth shut. Besides, I have to stick up for all the nooobs out there(that's me) trying to wrap their brain around Drupal. Where would we be without Views? lol nope, we would be screwed!
Past all that.. Has anyone looked through the issue que for Views? OMG. Yes, I have read some of the posts that would just make me run away.. Merlin and everyone else that works endless hours to help everyone and answer every question deserves the biggest 'Drupal Rocks' prize available. You guys may not see it this way, but you are the catalyst for the glue that holds Drupal together. I would bet the number of hours invested in Views alone would blow a sane persons mind. I haven't even said anything about Panels, another day maybe...
Let this count for all the "Thousands of people" that didn't find this thread!
We love your work!
A Huge Thank You!