On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 11:55 AM, Daevid Vincent <daevid@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > <?= $foo ?> is generally NOT what the short tags controversy are about. > > It's the use of <? Some php here ?> vs. <?php some php here ?> > This is the same thing my colleague told me when I first joined and began learning PHP and is the reason we use <?= and <?php. While it is true that the 'short_open_tag' directive enables both (for some > stupid reason), the issue is that it's poor form to use JUST <? And not > <?php just as it's a bad idea to use <% %> (asp tags). > This is what doesn't make sense to me. One camp says that short open tags are bad because the option is not always enabled, but that would include <?= as well. And if <? is only a problem when mixing PHP and XML--and you can always echo the XML directive anyway--I don't see that <? is actually a problem once you decide that <?= is okay (short_open_tags is enabled). The file extension is ".php" so it should be safe to assume that <? means PHP code follows just as <?= means a PHP expression follows. There must be some other reason why <? is bad while <?= is okay. If not, no big deal, and I'll probably keep using <?php anyway, but it seems odd that there would be so much controversy over it. This topic was very heated when the core PHP developers were going to remove > the <? Form all together in future PHP 6 versions and everyone got their > panties in a bunch because they assumed it meant the <?= form too (which it > did not). > Out of curiosity, did the original proposal for PHP 6 remove the short_open_tags setting (and thus <?= as well) or did it redefine <?= not to be a short open tag? David
