I am teaching myself the CakePHP framework. I see that CakePHP comes with a bunch of helpers, for example, the HTML helper. In the docs, I see that you can write
echo $this->Html->link('Enter', '/pages/home', array('class' => 'button', 'target' => '_blank'));
and it will display
<a href="/pages/home" class="button" target="_blank">Enter</a>
What exactly has this helper gained us? Both seem to be equally easy to write.