What is the best way to insert HTML via PHP?

Question

Talking from a \'best practice\' point of view, what do you think is the best way to insert HTML using PHP. For the moment I use one of the following methods (mostly the lat

Answer 1

Something I wish I'd known when I first started doing PHP: Keep your heavy-lifting program code as far away from your HTML output as possible. That way they both stay in large, fairly contiguous, readable chunks.

The best way I've found of doing this is to make a static HTML file first, maybe with some fake data so I can poke around and get the design right, then write PHP code to get the dynamic part of the output and glue them both together (how you do that part is up to you - you could do it with Smarty like others are suggesting).