I think that's because you come from a strongly-typed language perspective, and I've definitely paid 3X my fair dues giving the contrary view in this list for more than a decade, and I'm not up for re-hashing. There are many users of XML who don't have that perspective, and who happily use XML "data" binding without strong typing. You don't have to worry about it. You can stick to the standards that scratch your own itch.