> The worst part about it is the tags vs attributes fights. They both do the same thing and the only difference is preference.

They're not the same thing. If you look at it as the extensible markup language for documents that it is, "tags" (i.e. inner content) would be visible and "attributes" would not. If your XML document was processed by an application to convert to another type of document (PDF, etc.), and it didn't recognize a particular tag, it would be sensible for attributes to disappear, but inner content ("tags") to remain.

It's only seems like a preference thing if you look at XML as a structured data format like JSON is.

In data structure terms, attributes do allow nodes to be decorated with additional information without forcing any change on existing parsers. In JSON, this would require swapping, eg. "str" -> {"value": "str", "attrib1": "..."}.

> If you look at it as the extensible markup language for documents that it is, "tags" (i.e. inner content) would be visible and "attributes" would not.

  <input type="text" value="Is this text visible?" />