If you've been frustrated with the slowness that you've seen in parsing XML with PHP, then this new posting on phpPatterns.com might be of interest to you.

The author has been playing around with an alternative API for parsing XML which may appeal if you hate SAX and DOM and discovered that, in many cases, the XML Pull extension for PHP is faster than the SAX or DOM parsers. It's also *much* simpler to handle events and tags with this extension rather than with the SAX parser. This is always a good thing, given that a lot of the questions that I get are related to parsing XML and using PHP to grab good info out of it.

I think that XML in PHP still has a long way to go, but strides forward like this can really help to raise the expectations of the general public enough to make some real progress...