Honestly, I think a big reason is that Stack Overflow didn't exist at XMLs peak, so you had people generating XML by concatenation, to predictably disastrous re

Honestly, I think a big reason is that Stack Overflow didn't exist at XMLs peak, so you had people generating XML by concatenation, to predictably disastrous results. One of the first XSLT transforms I was ever given to maintain generated XML by the same method. <xsl:text><PRICE></xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="PRICE"/><xsl:text></PRICE></xsl:text> and so on.