> Unless the web server displays a huge red message every time it is run

Uhh... this is the first line the web server spits out:

PHP 5.4.0 Development Server started at Thu Jul 21 10:43:28 2011

The manual isn't exactly vague on this point either:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver....

So we got the warning already in there, what else would you like?

20 words of that manual were dedicated to letting people know its not for use in production. Un-highlighted and buried at the end of a paragraph that I initially skimmed over and didn't even read. No attention is directed at it in any way.

So the server outputs a message. Great. Is it huge, red and says "do not use me in production"? No. Its a standard version banner.

There's no pleasing you, is there?

Maybe we should add some <blink> and <marquee>?

Really? Look at the documentation page. The first thing you see is a huge chunk of text with absolutely no highlighting to guide you. Most people would just skim their eyes over that, and my attention gets drawn to the list of MIME types because it looks different.

Compare these two screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/Kzdphar.png http://i.imgur.com/CQnU8aG.png

A simple bold tag immediately draws focus and ensures that the huge majority of people who view the page get the important message. That's not being hard to please, it's just common sense.

I don't the person is being a pain. People will not heed a warning that is not clear and apparent. It's like the warning on the side a hot cup of McDonald's coffee. It's not paid any attention if it's not really, really, ####-->REALLY CLEAR<--#####.

Fair point. This is how that page will look after the weekly manual rebuild occurs on Friday: http://i.imgur.com/YXhafB5.png

I am of the opinion that it's simpler to write a basic PHP file than it is to configure Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd. I'd think that the majority of people running WordPress (likely the most distributed PHP project) are doing so on shared hosting, and not likely to want to or know how to configure their own server. The type of person interested in the built-in web server (a decent feature in my opinion, and comparable to `rails s`) is knowledgeable enough to know that the built-in web-server will not cut it for production traffic.