I previously dismissed PHP's alternative syntax for control structures, but after spending some time working on themes for WordPress and Habari, I've come to realise that it's actually very useful from a readability point of view. The point is that if you have a mix of code and HTML, as themes do, then it can be very difficult to work out what control structure that lone dangling close brace is actually closing. By spelling it out with a endif, endwhile or endforeach the code is made just a little bit clearer.

So, for templating, okay, I'll accept it. For other code, it's still at terrible idea.