Using PHP saves you from making typos and also makes it very easy to change the HTML of a certain type of form field all over your site.
Personally I prefer to use FormGenLib (frankmichel.de/formgenlib/user_guide/) to generate most of my forms. It makes for simple, easy to understand clean code, saves me from having to make one view-file for each form and has built in handling of the validation. The fields of the form is instead defined in the controller. Sadly Frank hasn't developed FormGenLib since about the same time as CI development slowed down. But it's open source so it's up to anyone.