[eluser]cahva[/eluser]
Yeah, they were meaning to deprecate short tags at one time and there was quite a debate about that. Conclusion was that theres no reason to deprecate or remove support for short tags. The ONLY thing why they were deprecating it was that it clashes with the xml tag "<?xml" and can cause trouble then(and which is easy to correct). Other than that, theres no downside using short tags and I personally use it in views(I still use the long version everywhere else) as it's prettier for my sensible coder eyes(and designers like it too).
