I don't want to use a filter, I would like to access a method defined in the view class in the view itself. The Bio::Seq class is part of the large BioPerl bundle and I don't want to subclass it (and use the subclass everywhere in my code) just to add a method that really doesn't belong to a class that is all about handling sequence data. What if I want to change the HTML code of the output? I would have to do that in My::Bio::Seq and then what if I use this in more than one web app and I want different rendering of the seq features? I don't think that would be a good idea for the same reason that you wouldn't want to provide a "to_html" method to every DBIx result set class.