IshKebab parent
XML nodes have attributes and contents. No programming language I know of works like that.
It doesn't seem like an especially important distinction. I've never understood why people always make such a big deal about it.
It's a big pain when decoding XML. That's not the only impedance mismatch. The fact that XML is just a soup of objects is not how programming language objects work either.
https://docs.rs/serde-xml-rs/0.6.0/serde_xml_rs/#caveats
Look at how much more complex this is than the equivalent JSON code, which requires none of these annotations: