Posted by rlee0001 on 02/12/06 02:46

Huh? What do specs have to do with portability?

<?= isn't portable. That means that using it will fail on some servers.
<?php echo... will run on any server where PHP is enabled regardless of
the server's configuration.

While you may have your development machine configured to accept the
malformed <?= syntax, once you move the code to a production server the
scripts may fail to parse correctly. As a result it is recommended by
the PHP Manual that developers: a) Disable short tag support on
development machines (to emulate the worst case scenario) and b) Never
use the short tags syntax.

The same holds true for "register globals" and other early PHP design
flaws.

-Robert

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