Okay, thanks Jeff and Mandes.
What do the rest of you think?
Am I setting a bad precedent here?
Debbie
For me, I have been doing more and more with the markup and PHP being separate as much as possible. It just makes each of your pages look cleaner, IMO, and they are definitely easier to deal with.
Another way to do it is to create a User class, define properties like personalData (which can be an associative array to hold name, surname, gender, username values) or lastActivity, define methods, like for status: getOnlineStatus(), or for gender: setGender(), getGender(), instantiate it, use a templating system for markup where you get the values of the properties from the new User object using its methods and mix those values in the markup in the templates.