PHP - To echo or not to echo?

Question

What is more efficient and/or what is better practice, to echo the HTML or have many open and close php tags?

Obviously for big areas of HTML it is sensible

Answer 1

Personally I tend to prefer what looks the best as code readability is very important, particularly in a team environment. In terms of best practice I'm afraid I'm not certain however it is usually best practice to optimize last meaning that you should write it for readability first and then if you encounter speed issues do some refactoring.

Any issues you have with efficiency are likely to be elsewhere in your code unless you are doing millions of echo's.

Another thing to consider is the use of an MVC to separate your "views" from all of your business logic which is a very clean way to code. Using a template framework such as smarty can take this one step further leading to epic win.