> I am still +1 on some how getting away from short_open_tag support, if > nothing else, to encourage better coding practices (just as we did with > turning register_globals off by default).
I fail to see how using <?php is "better coding practices". Unless you plan on distributing your code to the masses or mixing XML/XHTML without trivially escaping it, I see absolutely no point in using <?php over <?. In reality, very few people intermix PHP and XML. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to do so. People tend to keep the two separate and parse the XML from PHP. In the XHTML case, a lot of people mistakenly believe that they must start their documents with an <?xml encoding=...?> tag, which if you read the XHTML spec, is actually not necessary. The only use for the XML encoding tag is for XML parsers to get the right character encoding. Browsers, which are typically the target of PHP generated pages, get their character encoding from the Content-type header, or optionally from a similar meta tag. But even if you choose to put in the XML encoding tag, I find it a hell of a lot easier to just put <?echo '<?xml encoding="foobar"?>'?> at the top instead of changing hundreds of <? tags to <?php PHP became popular because it eliminated most of the tediousness of writing CGI scripts or low-level Apache modules. If we slowly but surely eliminate all the convenience aspects of PHP we are going to turn the experience back into one of tedium again. PHP is not a pure language. It never will be. The problem it solves is ugly. Ugly problems often require ugly solutions. Solving an ugly problem in a pure manner is bloody hard. PHP's aim is to make solving the web problem easy. Ergo, therefore, Q.E.D, removing all the "ugly" features of PHP is going to make it harder and harder to use PHP to solve the web problem. -Rasmus -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
