Description:
------------
Currently, PHP eats newlines following end tags as specified in the FAQ (http://us.php.net/manual/en/faq.using.php#faq.using.newlines). The documentation's justification for this feature is to make the HTML output more readable, but the reality is different (see Reproduce code section).

This is bearable because web browsers ignore this whitespace combination anyways, but for text output this causes a lot of headaches. I propose that the real reason for this feature is to prevent the "Headers already sent" error, such as in:

<?php /* some PHP code here */ ?>
<?php session_start(); ?>

PHP should have a configuration directive to disable this newline-stripping behavior, default to the old behavior for backwards compatibility if need be. This is way overdue.

References:

http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=20556
http://shiflett.org/blog/2005/oct/php-stripping-newlines
http://bradchoate.com/weblog/2007/05/10/php-and-newline-characters

Reproduce code:
---------------
<table> 
  <tr> 
    <td> 
      <?php echo 'TEST'; ?> 
    </td> 
  </tr> 
</table>

becomes

<table> 
  <tr> 
    <td> 
      TEST    </td> 
  </tr> 
</table>