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Date: Thu, 19 May 2011 08:35:13 -0700
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Is it true that short_open_tag is deprecated in
 PHP 6?
From: thruska@cubiclesoft.com (Thomas Hruska)

On 5/19/2011 12:23 AM, Arvids Godjuks wrote:
> It's essentially the same what I said - move it out of stort_tags and
> make it "On" permanently.
>
> As I remember the decision to remove short_tags was made together with
> register_globals, magic_quotes and other legacy stuff. I can be that I
> remember wrongly, but really do people really use<% ?

Would be **really** nice if '<?' with a whitespace as the next byte was 
also detected (i.e. '<? ', '<?\n', etc).  (Single-quotes have been added 
to aid readability.)

The '<? ' short tag is syntactic sugary convenience that is **widely** 
used:  Internal corporate servers, personal machines, and millions upon 
millions of websites.  The results and financial costs of cleaning up 
the upgrade fallout of removing the '<? ' short tag are incalculable.

Comparing short tags to magic_quotes/register_globals is apples to 
oranges.  The two are so vastly different and not in the same class. 
The latter is a failed security measure.  The former is a syntactic 
sugary convenience.  Every PHP userland developer I know understands the 
risks associated with magic_quotes and register_globals but, at the same 
time, they use the '<? ' short tag extensively wherever possible.

Or, perhaps more simply put:  If you remove the "syntactic sugary 
convenience" of the '<? ' short tag, you'll have an army of developers 
dropping by shortly after the release of PHP 6 and they will be 
incredibly unhappy.  But you just go ahead and remove the '<? ' short 
tag for PHP 6.  You'll be adding it back into PHP 6.0.1.

The ONLY reason anyone types '<?php ' in the first place is because  '<? 
' isn't guaranteed to work everywhere.  And that rule really only 
applies to open source software and certain web hosts, which is a very 
small segment of the total PHP market share.  It would probably be fine 
if you removed the _option_ itself but merged '<? ' detection into the 
core.  I don't know anyone who uses anything but '<? ', so it won't 
likely be a huge loss for anyone if '<% ' support is dropped (but I 
could be wrong about that).

The important part of this discussion is making sure convenient 
functionality doesn't just vanish for stupid reasons.  I recognize there 
will be breakage regardless because it is a new major version, but 
looking ahead one extra byte isn't going to kill you.

-- 
Thomas Hruska
CubicleSoft President

Barebones CMS is a high-performance, open source content management 
system for web developers operating in a team environment.

An open source CubicleSoft initiative.
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http://barebonescms.com/