Why has PHP short tags been enabled?

[kev woodman]

I've recently come across a problem on my sites hosted here where every page fails to render with a

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING

error on line 1.

Line one is actually the correct xml declaration and the reason that this error is showing is that php_short_tags has been turned on in the php.ini file. Can someone tell me why this has been done and whether it can be switched off? If it can't you had better warn people using the correct W3C syntax that their XML declaration will need to be written as a PHP statement.