Description:
------------
Can the decision to call bugs #13954 and #21891 bogus be revisited, please?

Reproduce code:
---------------
<?
$quality="red";
?>
<p>Your apple is more <?=$quality?>
than mine.</p>

Expected result:
----------------
Your apple is more red than mine.

Actual result:
--------------
Your apple is more redthan mine.


Even though the behavior is documented (http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.basic-syntax.instruction-separation.php), swallowing a newline that immediately follows a closing tag seems to be a pretty poor idea, especially if the rationale is to pretty up formatting as is alluded to (http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=13954) by jeroen.

Swallowing the newline is a surprise to anyone who encounters this bug (yes, bug). Additionally, it can easily lead to malformatted output (see sample included in this report). This malformatting can be difficult to detect and the solution--adding a trailing space after every closing tag (seriously???)--is a kludge through and through. This malformatting becomes catastrophic if you're using PHP to generate input to another program, as is the case for many of the people that have discussed the issue over the years.

I realize this discussion has been going on for nearly a decade. I have to assume this topic has become largely a political discussion, rather than a problem solving one, because the problem hasn't been solved yet.

In the spirit of problem solving, several people have suggested adding a setting to php.ini to re-enable the current behavior, which should eliminate the need to refactor any scripts affected by the correction. In any case, the current behavior should not be the default behavior.