oh ok I see. but what I meant was, I think a part of the php engine is running because of the fact that it has a .php extension, it searches for tags inside-therefore taking more time than opening a plain html file. May be an entirely different process though. I'm not too familiar with the development of the Zend engine. thanks anyways btw, your from Tonga? I'd love to be there right now
I don't like to use echo because it hard to modify later and if that html contain some javascript. I have to use escape char a lot. So i think the second is better for for maintainence and performanace.
Exactly how I feel, sometimes you have to use echo for php because of spacing problems etc when fragmenting code together, but overall I just end tag start tag around my php.