For the past two years, I have gotten pretty close with the HtmlHelper. It has been there for me, making my life easier than before. But that time has come to an end, so sorry HtmlHelper, you are just too much of a burden now a days. The HtmlHelper has been an amazing convenience by automatically building my anchor links, by creating images with the correct path, or linking my CSS from within separate views, and much much more. But why do all this when you can simply write the HTML yourself?
I am not sure why I didn't notice this sooner; I was probably just stoked on developing with CakePHP so I wanted to do everything the CakePHP way. Lately however, I have noticed that the HtmlHelper really isn't needed that much. I can only think of a few cases where it is needed: linking stylesheets/javascript dynamically, building breadcrumbs and creating routes. Everything else is just consuming PHP logic and processing time to render HTML, which you can simply write yourself in the first place and bypass the PHP interpreter.
Linking Routes
The primary use of the helper, but why not just use url() instead? By doing that you don't have to deal with the hassle of nesting your array of attributes, or escaping variables into the method call. You also don't have to worry about Cake being over zealous and escaping all your data. Take these examples, they deliver the same result.
// With the helper
<?php echo $this->Html->link('Anchor Link', array('controller' => 'news', 'action' => 'index'), array('title' => 'Anchor Title')); ?>
// Without the helper
<a href="<?php echo $this->Html->url(array('controller' => 'news', 'action' => 'index')); ?>" title="Anchor Title">Anchor Link</a>
// Or pure HTML if your routes never change
<a href="/news" title="Anchor Title">Anchor Link</a>
Doctypes and meta tags
Another example of using PHP to render HTML, when you can just write HTML. This gets even easier with HTML5.
<?php echo $html->docType('xhtml-trans');
echo $html->meta('keywords', 'miles johnson php mysql design code developement developer web production creation coding functions tutorials methods scripts packages open source cakephp cake bake controller component model behavior view helper'); ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<meta name="keywords" content="miles johnson php mysql design code developement developer web production creation coding functions tutorials methods scripts packages open source cakephp cake bake controller component model behavior view helper" />
Images
This one I am still 50/50 on. It helps by determining the base URL, detecting asset timestamps and appending the alt attribute. But this of course can still be written normally as well. I will let you decide.
<?php echo $this->Html->image('logo.png'); ?>
<img src="/img/logo.png" alt="" />
Divs, paragraphs, tables, lists, script blocks
All of these should never be used in the view or layout. Using PHP to render basic HTML tags like this is absurd in my opinion.
So when should the helper be used?
Like I stated above, there are only a few times when the helper should be used. The first is asset linking (stylesheets and javascript). This allows you to include an asset from within any view, which is then output within $scripts_for_layout. Why is this so awesome? Simple, you can have a specific stylesheet for a specific page, without having to include it on all pages.
Secondly is building breadcrumbs. From within your view you can define the "top level" or "trailing" crumb, and within your layout you can define the base crumbs. This allows you to add multiple levels of crumbs within different layers of views. A quick example, which would give you the trail of: Blog -> Archives -> Blog Title.
// In the view
$this->Html->addCrumb('Archive', array('controller' => 'blog', 'action' => 'archive');
$this->Html->addCrumb($blog['Blog']['title'], array('controller' => 'blog', 'action' => 'read', $blog['Blog']['id']);
// In the layout
$this->Html->addCrumb('Blog', array('controller' => 'blog', 'action' => 'index');
Lastly, the primary reason that the HtmlHelper has all these convenience methods, is so that you can use them within other helpers. Since it's impossible to render HTML within PHP without string concatenation, the HtmlHelper gives other helpers the ability to render HTML easily without all the hardship. That is the primary reason of this helper.
Now all of this is a personal opinion of course, but since I didn't realize most of this for a while, I thought some of you might not have either. This is neither belittling the CakePHP dev team as they have done an awesome job so far, so thank you! So take it how you wish and code how you like. Enjoy!