From a best-practices perspective the  `?>` tag is occasionally problematic and shouldn't be used unless strictly necessary (i.e. literal output follows it). It *shouldn't* cause a lot a issues in a project like this but this one line is an example of a case where the semantics are subtly changed because of the following two empty lines. Yes, those two empty lines probably shouldn't be there (they weren't doing anything in the original file), but the more robust solution is to simply not use `?>`.