With regards to "Direct HTML embedding."... PHP is a Web scripting language (which I consider to be very different from a general-purpose programming language

With regards to "Direct HTML embedding."... PHP is a Web scripting language (which I consider to be very different from a general-purpose programming language or even a scripting language), designed and developed to generate markup. I have seen a lot of "templating" libraries (Smarty among them) and all they do is mimic the basic syntax of PHP using something else that is not PHP. I know the theory ("designers don't know how or want to program"), but learning PHP conditional statements or loops is as difficult or simple as any "templating" library that asks you to learn its exotic syntax. Now, MVC is good and one should avoid blending presentation code with models and controllers, but most MVC frameworks fail when they require you to instantiate a gazillion extra objects, just to render a Web page.