Is creating empty views really necessary?

Question

I have a view_A (UIView class), and then i create a subview (view_background) using UIImageView, and then add another subview to the master view of a UIWebView style (UIWebView), and then an overlay view to catch touches view_overlay.
My question is, do I really need the parent view_A object, or can I just put in a UIImageView class and tag onto that one. I can't recall what my previous experiments determined but i have some suspicion that you can't build down from a UIImageView and get touches properly.
Perhaps a more experience person can explain the recommend hierarchy of windows, this pattern is extremely common, having a background picture for a view, adding a webview on top of it to display some HTML stuff, and the an overlay view to grab touches.

Answer 1

A UIImageView is a UIView so you should be able to use it in its place. This is what I have done in the past:
// Custom UIViewController
- (void) loadView {
// if the main view/background is going to be an image
// why create a blank UIView just to hold the image?
UIImageView *imgView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:someImg];
// expects a UIView but imgView IS a UIView
self.view = imgView;
[imgView release];
You can still add subviews to self.view as usual.