I need help with .htaccess, im a noob

so i use iweb(mac) to create a website, then i find a pretty decent host. well turn out something about the php.ini on the host side needs to change something about the short open tag needs to be set to no. but they wont do it. they suggested i write an htaccess file to change this. but i have no idea how, and after looking all over google i'm even more confused i was wondering if someone could help me

If you're using HTML why would you need short open tags set to no?

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