The @-operator is often used to silence errors in noisy PHP functions'"functions that generate warnings that can not be easily prevented. [...] In those cases, there is no way how to check up-front whether the function call will not issue a warning when being called.

There are side effects to using the operator, however, including hiding legitimate errors and making debugging that much more difficult. To back up his point, he includes four other reasons to avoid the operator's use (besides the debugging issues):

• It's slow (part 1)
• It's slow (part 2)
• It's slow (part 3: It generates crappier code)
• Apfelstrudels were harmed (related to the strudel_token in the C code for the operator)

The web site I currently work on is going to be for the hotel where my step father is the manager of. One of the things that is going to be an important 'feature' for the site, is to make it printer friendly.

Since the new site has a very clean markup, I thought about simply creating an additonal style sheet for the media type "print". However, after thinking about it a little bit more today, I came to to the conclusion that I'm dealing with WYSIWYG visitors. So I decided to get a little fancier, and to create a PrintController, which would output printable versions of any site requested by /print/*

He gives the code for the controller and for the easy to use link to go over to the "printable version" of each page, hiding the none-printable information from the browser.