Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy. This forum is not for asking programming related questions.
Also <?php although until recently, I was using <?. I got errors popping up all over the place since I needed to use <?xml version=1?>, for my XHTML documents. Then I turned the short tags off and just use <?php for everything.
Since then, my hands have just been used to typing <?php ...
Imho short tags are an irritating source of potential errors. Sooner or later a script written with short tags will get installed somewhere they're not enabled resulting in fire, flood and earthquakes.
Using XML so <? ?> is a definite no no for me. Plus, as others have mentioned, it can be disabled so it's not reliable. <?php ?> is a much better option IMHO.
<?php of course... Since it is sufficiently unique.
I think you should have added <script language="php"></script> to the poll options since I havn't seen anyone using it...
If someone does install it on a system without short tags enabled, it's a simple matter of leaving a note in a README file or enabling it yourself. I'd never stop using this way because of incompatability issues. That's like never coding gd or ming because it might not be enabled on the server someone else might have configured differently.
It's probably something to note, that if you're using <? ?>, you are at the mercy of server configurations as well as having to face the possibility that the PHP dev team may remove the option for short tags altogether because of compatibility issues with XML. Not saying they will but they did turn off register_globals, so I doubt short tags are sacred to them.
You should use <? php at least at the start of the page, and definitely everytime you have a code snippet if you're mixing in other technologies on the page.
Don't forget to //document your functions. It's the best gift you can give to yourself as a newbie. If you're consulting, clients will really appreciate the professionalism of easy to read, easy to understand code.
For instance, //this code rocks, or //I rule, look here