There was. It was called Hack[0]. Among other things it had XHP built in so you could write HTML natively (as opposed to concatenating strings) and define your own templates easily[0]. It even handled escaping. It really improved on a ton of PHP's flaws.
replyUnfortunately newer versions of PHP killed it and it's dead now, and even more unfortunately while PHP absorbed a lot of features from Hack, native XML was not one of them. There was even going to be a Hack version of the Composer package manager but that never got finished AFAIK. Distros stopped supporting it. I think I still have my half-finished attempt at a Hacker News fork in Hack sitting around on a hard drive somewhere. I can't even find an environment to run it in anymore.