NYCPHP Meetup

[Paul A Houle]

Chuck Reeves wrote:
> I think there is some discrepancy with this ini directive.  In the 
> study book "Zend PHP5 Certification Guide" form PHP|Architect, It 
> states that the short tags are deprecated.  I am not seeing any other 
> references to short tags being deprecated.  In fact in the 
> documentation for the Zend Framework, it's stating that short tags can 
> be used as long as the directive is turned on:
>
> http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.view.html#zend.view.introduction.shortTags
>
>
> Has any one out there heard of short tags being deprecated? 
>  

    I like the short tags,  they're a comfortable syntax for templating 
that's both simpler and more powerful than templating "problems" like 
smarty.
   
    However,  most PHP style guides advise against the short tags.  I 
think they're not quite SGML compliant,  so some HTML editors might not 
handle them correctly.  Also,  like magic_quotes_gpc,  short tags may or 
may not be turned on for a given server,  so it's one more thing that 
can break your app.  Now,  I'm sure ~your~ organization is better,  but 
there are ~some~ organizations that have 10 web servers with PHP and 
it's pretty random if magic_quotes_gpc or short tags are turned on or off. 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/200640/are-php-short-tags-acceptable-to-use