Adam Trachtenburg has written a nice little article detailing what makes PHP 5 so damn special in comparision to previous versions. This article is really nothing new compared to the previous 100 articles that describe what the new features are in v.5, but his writing makes this one a little bit more enjoyable.
In short, SimpleXML kicks ass!
Gotta love that.
imo simplexml is broken. You can’t handle tags that are not valid identifiers, so no ‘:’ or ‘-’, plus IIRC php5 still does not allow unicode data, just utf-8, so every xml with tags that are not utf8 can’t be handled.
I agree, there are few xml encoded in utf-16 out there, but this does not make SimpleXML less broken.