Core PHP Programming, Third Edition

26.2. Using PHP to Output All HTML

Any of the examples in the previous section is an excellent first step toward introducing PHP into a Web site. Their impact in terms of server load is relatively low. I like to think of sites using similar approaches as being PHP-enabled, as if they had a small injection of PHP that makes them extraordinary. The step beyond this is what I think of as PHP-powered: a site made completely of PHP. In this approach every byte of output comes from PHP. The print function sends HTML tags. Every page is a script inside a single pair of PHP tags.

You might have noticed that most of the examples in the book take this approach. I have found that while this requires extra time up front, the code is much more maintainable. ...