Making it an extension rather than default was a mistake on PHP's part. 99% of PHP is being run on shared servers and most people cant recompile it, and most of the rest just won't.
Having a language whose entire purpose is to be a templating language for HTML have no concept of what HTML is, is just ridiculous. You have to use a templating framework that rolls its own ad-hoc DSL and parser to manage context just to make PHP do what it should be able to do safely and sanely out of the box.
It doesn't matter now, since "web dev" is whatever JS vibe-coded nonsense Claude shits out and no one cares anymore, but ye gods it could have been so much better.
It was never any kind of official extension, it was an outright fork of PHP (it changed the grammar) and FB never really attempted to push it to core, or really engage with PHP's core dev process in any way. PHP came about in the era of server-side includes, and expecting it to have grokked the DOM structure out of the box is just hindsight.
Anyway, I don't even think about server-side rendering anymore, and for the last few days have had Claude "shitting out" Vue components that replace legacy Bootstrap 3 components with html5 alternatives for my PHP app to use via Inertia.js. The axe-grinding is not helpful to either of us.
> PHP came about in the era of server-side includes, and expecting it to have grokked the DOM structure out of the box is just hindsight.
Obviously not from the beginning. But by the time template frameworks like Twig came around it should have been possible. If it can be done at runtime it's possible to build into the language proper. And I'm specifically talking about the time when PHP 7 started taking other features from Hack.
I'm not grinding an axe here, i'm just stating an opinion.
I have a client I've been working with for decades (because they're great people to work with), maintaining and improving their php code base that still uses Smarty templates. So I know and hate Smarty from first hand experience, and appreciate what a terrible idea Smarty is and why.
I've also extensively used Zope and Plone, which attempt to give designers a "safe" set of capabilities and subset of Python which was a total disaster. Template DSLs always end up trying to regrow programming language features, much usually worse then the languages they are implemented in.
Zope is particularly illustrative because it recursively accumulated: TAL, METAL, TALES, RestrictedPython, and DTML: all to avoid "just use Python templates". (And don't even get me started on all the layers CMF and Plone introduced!)
This happened with Smarty, Zope Page Templates (ZPT), TAL/METAL, RestrictedPython, Django templates, Helm templates, Jenkins pipelines, GitHub Actions YAML, Terraform HCL, and countless other attempts to create a "safe non-programmer-friendly mini-language" that eventually mutates into a worse programming language, often with horribly leaky abstraction layers of \escaping and < perfect syntax and <
Having a language whose entire purpose is to be a templating language for HTML have no concept of what HTML is, is just ridiculous. You have to use a templating framework that rolls its own ad-hoc DSL and parser to manage context just to make PHP do what it should be able to do safely and sanely out of the box.
It doesn't matter now, since "web dev" is whatever JS vibe-coded nonsense Claude shits out and no one cares anymore, but ye gods it could have been so much better.