> >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.
<LOUD CHEEER!!!> Rick -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
