I'm pretty impressed at all the excitement coming out of the whole design4drupal initiative. Lots of people are talking, and the chatter is everywhere. Unfortunately, from my perspective, it's looking like it may actually turn out to be one of the most damaging things that can happen to Drupal, and this one is bothering me at a very deep level. And perhaps this is something that's been building up, because I have definitely noticed my enthusiasm waning over the last year, and things like this are really putting a bullet into the heart of it.

Today, I read a comment where someone had the balls to say they respect me (actually it was "The Views authors" which, by itself, shows an unfortunate lack of engagement with the community right there) but...oh and the words "terrible," "wrote that module off," and "makes nested table layouts from the nineties look pretty."

First, whatever the author actually intended, I found these words absolutely hurtful. There's criticism and then there's ripping. And I understand there's a lot of criticism to be had out there, and I'm pretty happy to deal with constructive criticism. This isn't. Being told that my work is absolute shit hurts, no matter what you were thinking. I've invested four years of my life into this, and stuff like this makes me wonder if that investment was a mistake.

To address the actual criticism, yes, Views markup is heavy. But you want to know something funny? I hear the *exact* same criticisms from database gurus who think that the SQL that pretty much any query builder uses is terrible. They won't USE query builders because they can make their queries just a little bit prettier, just a little bit more performant. Of course, when you write a query to do just one thing, it's a whole lot easier to make that query do exactly what you want it to do.

The same problem exists with building a modular system. Clean markup is something that HTML purists really want. I get that. But bad-mouthing what Views produces isn't going to get you that, and worse, it seems like it fundamentally misunderstands what Views does. Frankly, if you want clean markup, DON'T USE GENERIC BUILDERS.

The problem with Views and even more with Panels is that *anything* can be in there. And by anything I mean, literally, anything in the system. And if you know CSS at all, you understand that cascading really does mean cascading. If it uses more generic markup, what happens when you have a view inside a view inside a view? Well, I can answer that question for you, because I've seen it. Suddenly the results start getting really ugly because the more generic styles are applying in layers that are ugly.

If I just stop producing these divs? Well, people who *aren't* HTML purists are suddenly unable to just write a little bit of CSS to do their styling. Much in the same way that if Views wrote tighter SQL but required more intervention to tweak, someone whose expertise is primarily HTML is going to find it unusable, if Views produced the kind of markup people are asking for, people less experienced with the front end aren't going to be able to do as much with a little bit of CSS.

And here's the kicker: Every time I've used this argument, the HTML purists say that *those* people don't matter. Oh, not in so many words, but they'll dance around the point and basically I'm an asshole. Well, my answer to that is frankly rude, and not fit for a public blog. Views is incredibly themable. If an HTML purist isn't capable of theming Views into getting the pure HTML they want, then maybe they are in the wrong business. But please, don't push the other 80% out of the way because you want a few less divs. Somehow, I'm the inflexible one because I want to support people who are not developers, not HTML experts, not CSS experts and not SQL experts.

Oh, and finally, pigeonholing people and stereotyping people by what they do is offensive:

I mean, views is an awesome module and I respect the authors very much, but they are probably not frontend developers.

(Emphasis mine)

This, right there, is a problem. The design community has had a problem in Drupal, with a general feeling that they were unloved by developers. Well, this is why. Sure, it is true that I'm not a front end developer, but when you don't even know WHO the Views author [SINGULAR] is, you have no business making judgements about what I am or am not. It's basically justification for name-calling. "Of *course* they don't think like they do, and therefore it must be wrong, and it's a bunch of crap.. Never mind that your perfect HTML is going to be used on a very small number of sites, yet this generic HTML is going to be used on tens of thousands. But hey, what do I know about the front end? I'm just a developer.

I'm pissed. This is not an isolated incident. I've had fights about this in the issue queue, and these people have usually started the fights with name calling. Well, frankly, if this is how you honestly feel about my software, I really wish you'd return to the days of building your own HTML, CSS and queries, because I think you're making a really big mistake using this stuff. If you really think Views' markup is terrible, or something that makes you hearken for the 90s, I think that's very sad for you. I think that attitudes like this have been part of why the designer community has struggled to really get a foothold in Drupal, because when it's ok to treat developers like crap, I just feel used, abused and like I wasted 4 years of my life so I can read about how terrible my code's output is.