Bingo. This is why I hate XML. Nothing wrong with the syntax - I hate that I have to massage arrays, dicts, etc. in cryptic ways to generate the XML output, the

Bingo. This is why I hate XML. Nothing wrong with the syntax - I hate that I have to massage arrays, dicts, etc. in cryptic ways to generate the XML output, then massage them right back at the other end. And PHP's SimpleXML module, at least, is anything but - lots of iterators, casting objects to string, and "where did my data go?".