<p>I seem right now to be embroiled in a debate with another programmer on this project who thinks that views have no merits.  He proposes a system that PHP looks something like this:</p>

<pre><code>$draw = new Draw;
$nav = $draw-&gt;wideHeaderBox().
$draw-&gt;left().
    $draw-&gt;image().
        Image::get($image,60,array('id'=&gt;'header_image')).
    $draw-&gt;imageEnd().
$draw-&gt;leftEnd().
$draw-&gt;left(10).
    '&lt;div id="header_text"&gt;'.
        self::defaultSectionText().
    '&lt;/div&gt;'.
$draw-&gt;leftEnd().
</code></pre>

<p>and so on (this is in the controller btw).  Now his arguments for this actually make some sense, he claims that if there is a redesign all we need to do is change the HTML in one place and it changes everywhere automatically. For some reason however, this method still rubs me the wrong way, is there any merit to views over this method?  I mean besides not having to retype HTML by hand.</p>

The argument he uses is the argument you need to
have
views. Both result in only changing it in one place. However, in his version, you are mixing view markup with business code.
I would suggest using more of a templated design. Do all your business logic in the PHP, setup all variables that are needed by your page. Then just have your page markup reference those variables (and deal with no business logic whatsoever).
Have you looked at smarty?
http://smarty.php.net