[smacktoward]

Should be, absolutely.

Are, nope.

PHP's long-lived popularity means there's a huge amount of ancient PHP articles and tutorials still out there on the web that use the old library. Because these articles are both old and widely linked-to, they tend to come up when newbies search for PHP help. So they learn how to do things the wrong/deprecated way.

Resources like PHP the Right Way (http://www.phptherightway.com/) help counter this, but it'll continue to be a problem as long as using the old library doesn't cause any obvious problems like immediate crashes, screaming in-your-face error messages, etc.