Most people are looking forward to the release of a PHP version containing the full SimpleXML extension, but it seems that Davey Shafik doesn't quite share that opinion.

SimpleXML, is - quite frankly - a steaming pile of body waste-produce. Whilst playing with Crtx_Template, I've encountered a very big limitation in SimpleXML - its completely asinine support of namespaces. This means, that you can never use SimpleXML to simply iterate through all the nodes in a tree. In fact you cannot really do anything much at all with the original Tree structure of the document. Any mixing of namespaces is just hell to handle. This, coupled with the failure to include the rather important registerNamespace() method (a simplexml version of DomXPath::registerNamespace()) - which cripples the SimpleXML XPath method when working with the default namespace - render SimpleXML quite useless for anything complex.

He plans to stick with the DOM extension for the time being - and I can't say I blame him. SimpleXML is still the new kid on the block, and it's going to have its share of issues. Hopefully, though, they will be resolved soon enough...