Use long tags instead of short tags in templates.

[demiankatz]

Discussion of #913 brought up this idea -- short tags are not really recommended PHP practice at this point. Can we live with using regular <?php tags in our templates? This PR shows what it would look like. Please discuss below.

TODO

• Test
• Make sure php-cs-fixer is configured to prevent regressions in future (may depend on Update PHP-CS-Fixer #897)

[crhallberg]

Would it be a good idea or a good time to use a light templating engine? That way we can follow best practices and keep the readability? I take this back, every template engine I looked at would not solve this problem easily.

[demiankatz]

The experience of using (and eventually abandoning) Smarty has left me fairly skeptical about template engines in general. There are certainly some pain points to pure PHP templates that an engine might alleviate, but to my mind, they're not currently severe enough to outweigh the benefit of avoiding a new dependency and introducing extra overhead into view rendering. (Not to mention the huge effort likely needed to rewrite all of our view helpers for some other platform).

[crhallberg]

I agree. And since that's the case, I could live with long tags in templates.

I may scan through this PR and see what this does to some of the more complex inline statements. Maybe this can make a different approach better.

[crhallberg]

What's the take on short echo statements like <?=?

[demiankatz]

Short echo is okay -- nobody seems to object to it, and PHP has support for it turned on by default. It's just plain short tags that are a problem because they're off by default and more potentially ambiguous when mixing tools.

[demiankatz]

This is rendered obsolete by #1063.