I'm currently looking at ways of transfering informations coming from a database
to an XML file. All the examples I've seen so far use tag elements to represent
fields, where I see the use of attributs as a more natural and efficient
way of representing field values. Am I missing something ?

There way:
<Contact>
<FirstName>Pierre</FirstName>
<LastName>Lamontagne</LastName>
</Contact>

My way:
<Contact FirstName="Pierre" LastName="Lamontagne" />