In the thread What’s your favorite “programmer ignorance” pet peeve?, the following answer appears, with a large amount of upvotes:
Programmers who build XML u
If you need trivial XML then it's fine. Its just the maintainability of string concatenation breaks down when the xml becomes larger or more complex. You pay either at development or at maintenance time. The choice is yours always - but history suggests the maintenance is always more costly and thus anything that makes it easier is worthwhile generally.