> let $makeElement := function($k, $v) {
>   parse-xml('<' || $k '>' || $v '</' || $k '>' )

We really shouldn't be encouraging anyone to construct lexical XML by string
concatenation, in any language. We see so many StackOverflow problems caused
by people doing it wrong, specifically, forgetting to do the escaping of
special characters, or checking that strings used as names are valid names.

Michael Kay
Saxonica