A combination of Views 3 and the Semantic Views module is usually enough for me.

Under extreme circumstances where i want absolutely zero markup, e.g. to display a completely custom date, i create my own tiny template for the field in question (choosing the right file to create using the Theme Information part of the View). In your template, the default is...

print $output;

...which is completely useless. For my date example, i replaced that with...

print my_pretty_date($row->{$field->aliases['field_date_value']} ,
                     $row->{$field->aliases['field_date_value2']}
                    );

That will let me run my custom date formatting function with dates in MySQL datetime format.

IMPORTANT: i don't know if the $row data is sanitised. Hard to find out too.

A combination of Views 3 and the Semantic Views module is usually enough for me.

Under extreme circumstances, when I want absolutely zero markup, e.g. to display a completely custom date, I create my own tiny template for the field in question (choosing the right file to create using the Theme Information part of the View). In your template, the default is print $output;, which is completely useless. For my date example, i replaced that with:

print my_pretty_date($row->{$field->aliases['field_date_value']},
  $row->{$field->aliases['field_date_value2']}
);

That will let me run my custom date formatting function with dates in MySQL datetime format.

IMPORTANT: I don't know if the $row data are sanitized. It is hard to find out too.