short tags thoughts

Hey, I'm really not enjoying the fact that short_tags is defaulted to on right now as I'm trying to make all my page work XHTML compliant. This means that I have to put <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?> in my pages. This is also a pain when I'm working on pages for WAP devices. I don't know if anybody else is experiencing this problem, but I was wondering if there are any thoughts about making short_tags off by default. Additionally, <?php= should work like <?= (IMHO), seems like it makes sense, and <?= doesn't have anything to do with short_tags being on or off. It seems like <?php= would make some code more "standardizable". Questions/comments/Devon-is-way-off-targets? Thanks, Devon