Although frankly I really didn't feel the need to read the entire thread, I can tell you that the posting to the PHP 3 mailing list is related to the Smarty Templating Engine back in the day. In fact, I believe this was the original spec Andrei proposed before Smarty even existed. Although I don't remember the exact e-mail, this posting reminded me that there was a point in time I thought exactly this way... quoting myself:

"The differences between how I work now and how you propose work be done in the future is staggering -- you are asking me to let a designer that I don't trust to write basic HTML to write advanced control loops and logic blocks using a top-end system which converts this pseudo-language into PHP and THEN processes the PHP Code... FINALLY outputting the page to the user... assuming that designer wrote his code right AND the top-level parsing engine actually parsed it correctly. "

All quite ironic considering that John has given Numerous Talks on Smarty, am the author of IntSmarty, and this very web site is completely Smarty-powered. Just remember, the internet remembers all - whether cached somewhere or out in plain sight.

So I'll say it, everyone mark it down in your calendars -- I was dead nuts wrong. Okay, now everyone go get back to your real jobs.