For years there has been a ferocious debate about whether it is better to abstract away HTML creation with PHP by using a template language, or whether we should stick with PHP itself as the template language. I always thought the best way to go was a with a hybrid. A templating language which resembles XML, sort of like what you get with JSTL. There have been some attempts , which have been pretty good. Facebook, however, just took this one step further, and integrated XML into PHP with XHP. This is sort of reminicient of XML Literals in VB. They have released the code on github already. The best part about it is that every XML element is represented by a class, leaving room to create sophisticated widgets out of XML tags!