I’ve been doing a little work with PHP recently. Nothing earth-shattering, just dipping in to build a custom theme for Wordpress. Anyway, the reason I mention it is just how visible all of the markup is. I’ve always been totally sold the idea that seperating behaviour and code from the markup (from a server side coding perspective) is evolution, and that script tags mixed in with markup is mucky and hard to maintain.
The flip side that nobody talks about is how you can clearly see exactly what will be sent to the client. There is no layer of abstraction - you can directly see the markup when you’re writing code. I know there are many benefits to the server control model that ASP.NET has adopted, but I sometimes wonder if these benefits outweight the very clear advantage of being able to see exactly what is happening. I definately think this is reflected in the typical quality of markup on a PHP site compared with an ASP.NET site.
Any thoughts?