Phil Sturgeon has a new post to his blog about something the CodeIgniter framework offers - HTML helper functions - and why they're a very happy thing.

A complaint I often hear about CodeIgniter is one about HTML helper functions like form_open(), doctype() and img(). [...] These points of view come from people who do not understanding the potential benefits of using HTML helpers - whichis fair enough as I used to think they were useless too.

He starts with two things to refute these common complains including the structure they can bring to a script (it looks cleaner) and, similarly, that they're not a violation of the MVC "no HTML outside the view" school of thought. Instead they're really helpers, providing shortcuts into these chunks of HTML to include into the view.

With this covered, he gets into the point of the article, what these helpers can do for your CodeIgniter application. He uses a specific example of the shortening of a form opening tag using the form_open function.