Comment by int_19h

Attributes are way shorter to write.

That said, these days most Microsoft XML dialects are actually XAML-based, and in XAML attributes are basically syntactic sugar - you can write:

  <Foo Bar="123">

or

  <Foo>
    <Foo.Bar>123</Foo.Bar>
  </Foo>

(the dot in the syntax makes it possible for the XAML parser to distinguish nested elements that represent properties from nested elements that represent child objects)