The one you use is better (correct).

Utterly disagree. Attributes can actually have validated contents, such as enumerated lists, etc, and are attractively terse.

Over-reliance on elements are why Maven pom files are such a verbose disaster, and probably the main reason why web developers puke when trying to stream data. Restating element names make for illegible, bloated data. Attribute-heavy XML is attractively terse and benefits from validation (unlike JSON).

But you can't change an attribute to a composite type in the future easily.

As for maven POMs, I use Netbeans "add dependency" and that's about it so it's a non issue for me.