I agree one hundred percent that abstracting your code out into OO modules with templates to render the HTML is the most sensible way to manage code for big web projects - but if you're going to do that, why use PHP? That's a serious question - I don't understand why someone would want to turn their back on the wealth of pre-written code in CPAN in order to use a language which was 'designed for the web' only to use that language in the exact same way they would have used Perl. In Yahoo's case, the decision is even more impenetrable since they already have a large investment in Perl code.