Over on PHPComplete this morning, there's a new little commentary from the site's maintainer, Jason, about why PHP template engines will die.

As this commentary states: Template engines have a purpose, and can be useful in other ways beyond the obvious. All someone has to do is look to other programs to see where templates are used every day. Most word processing programs allow you to create templates where you fill in a few values, like the title and author of a document, and it does all the formatting for you.

Some of the most used PHP systems out there are Smarty and the other templating systems, but, according to this critique, they're going to go the way of the dodo pretty soon. Web technologies like XSL are making the need for a PHP-based display technology obsolete, and, if this article is right, they'll either need to adapt or die.

So in truth, these template engines are not dead. They are not going to die out, either. They will evolve to fill other needs. However, their days as being the primary template engine for websites is numbered.