Short tags are widely frowned upon. IIRC they are deprecated in the current release of PHP and are due to be removed in the next major release. Not using them s

Short tags are widely frowned upon. IIRC they are deprecated in the current release of PHP and are due to be removed in the next major release. Not using them seems quite fair to me. (Incidentally, though, the <?= tags are now considered a fundamental feature and not part of the short tags syntax, so you can use those everywhere.)