Re: Re: Is it true that short_open_tag is deprecated in PHP 6?

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. Your choice of a MIT or LGPL license. http://barebonescms.com/