I've noticed that as well, but I doubt those additional tokens hurt. You can make an unholy mess with namespaces and all of the bells-and-whistles that XML pro

I've noticed that as well, but I doubt those additional tokens hurt. You can make an unholy mess with namespaces and all of the bells-and-whistles that XML provides, or you can not. But even if you just structure using <tag></tag> without any of the fancy stuff, you still can create pipelines that operate on that structured format in ways that are more powerful than plain text.