Bloat

We recently launched another Drupal-powered website, and one minor requirement was a custom node-type that included a date field. We needed to output a simple date... say, something like:

<div class="date">Saturday, August 18, 2007</div>

Turns out Drupal likes dates a bit fatter:

<div class="field field-type-datestamp field-field-date">
  <div class="field-items">
    <div class="field-item">
      <span class="date-display-single"> Saturday, August 18, 2007 </span>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

Which led to yet another conversation between myself and Ken regarding Drupal, some of the disconnects between that CMS and our process, and their solutions. Needless to say, there remains no one-size-fits-all solution. The features offered by Drupal, its vocal and active community, and its highly modular architecture make it an incredibly effective product for a wide range of implementations. On the other hand there are significant sacrifices -- for one, ridiculous HTML-bloat. Or, when it's worth it, there is the time lost trimming that same bloat.