Fw: Write to a XML document

Nearly 2 years ago the first JAVA developer arrived in our service and we
started our own developement of our web site.

Us RPG programmers have been creating a kind of text files with this kind of
format to the IFS, for the JAVA guy to exploit :

+source(tSource)

|library=QSYS

|file=QRPGLESRC

|member=M1

+procedure(tProcedure)

|name=AcqAdrP

|descriptif= line 1

|descriptif= line 2,etc

-procedure

-source

I've only just discovered that these files are then converted to XML. This
raises a numger of problems. I'm having difficulty understanding why we don't
just write directly to XML. Something to do with validity checking. Can anyone
explain this to me in simple terms ?

Thanks