I'm not sure why you believe that it is necessary to do stuff like <?=$varname;?>. Certainly, a competent PHP programmer can use file operations and str_replac

I'm not sure why you believe that it is necessary to do stuff like <?=$varname;?>. Certainly, a competent PHP programmer can use file operations and str_replace to do templating; it's pretty much what I do right now. The template for a dog-related site I'm working on looks like this: <div class="dog" id="dog_{{__id__}}"> <h1 class="name">{{__name__}}</h1> <p class="sex">{{__sex__}}</p> <p class="breed">{{__breed__}}</p> <p class="images">{{__pictures__}}</p> <div class="description">{{__description__}}</div> </div> (The formatting appears to be lost; accept my apologies) That said, I am also working on fixing a restaurant site that a friend programmed, and it is littered with the type of disgusting syntax you mention. It's the difference between a designer who does snippets of PHP and a programmer.