html code blocks

I have been exposed to a lot of asp in the last few months and there is a cool thing that it can do. That is get around echo (response.write) statements, like this; <% if blah then%> <html code block> <%else if blah%> <html code block> <%end if%> asp will actually load the html inside the condition statement that is met and ignore the rest. Of coarse asp has a lot of other things that suck, but this is cool. I am pretty new to both asp and php, but can php do this?. Does it work the same way?