Just a Theory

There’s an old saying, “Whoever doesn’t understand X is doomed to reinvent it.”X can stand for any number of things. The other day, I was pointing out that such is the case for ORM developers. Take ActiveRecord, for example. As I demonstrated in a 2007 Presentation, because ActiveRecord doesn’t support simple things like aggregates or querying against functions or changing how objects are identified, you have to fall back on using its find_by_sql() method to actually run the SQL, or using fuck typing to force ActiveRecord to do what you want. There are only two ways to get around this: Abandon the ORM and just use SQL, or keep improving the ORM until it has, in effect, reinvented SQL. Which would you choose?

I was thinking about this as I was hacking on a Drupal installation for a client. The design spec called for the comment form to be styled in a very specific way, with image submit buttons. Drupal has this baroque interface for building forms: essentially an array of arrays. Each element of the array is a form element, unless it’s markup. Or something. I can’t really make heads or tails of it. What’s important is that there are a limited number of form elements you can create, and as of Drupal 5, image isn’t fucking one of them!.

Now, as a software developer, I can understand this. I sometimes overlook a feature when implementing some code. But the trouble is: why have some bizarre data structure to representa subset of HTML when you have something that already works: it’s called HTML. Drupal, it seems, is doomed to reinvent HTML.

So just as I have often had to use find_by_sql() as the fallback to get ActiveRecord to fetch the data I want, as opposed to what it thinks I want, I had to fallback on the Drupal form data structure’s ability to accept embedded HTML like so:

$form['submit_stuff'] = array(
  '#weight' => 20,
  '#type'   => 'markup',
  '#value'  => '<div class="form-submits">’
             . '<label></label><p class="message">(Maximum 3000 characters)</p>'
             . '<div class="btns">'
             . '<input type="image" value="Preview comment" name="op" src="preview.png" />'
             . '<img width="1" height="23" src="divider.png" />'
             . '<input type="image" value="Post comment" name="op" src="post.png" />'
             . '</div></div>',
);

Dear god, why? I understand that you can create images using an array in Drupal 6, but I fail to understand why it was ever a problem. Just give me a templating environment where I can write the fucking HTML myself. Actually, Drupal already has one, it’s called PHP!. Please don’t make me deal with this weird hierarchy of arrrays, it’s just a bad reimplementation of a subset of HTML.

I expect that there actually is some way to get what I want, even in Drupal 5, as I’m doing some templating for comments and pages and whatnot. But that should be the default IMHO. The weird combining of code and markup into this hydra-headed data structure (and don’t even get me started on the need for the #weight key to get things where I want them) is just so unnecessary.

In short, if it ain’t broke, don’t reinvent it!

</rant>