A question of style

I just started working with some stylesheets developed by someone else and
was surprised at some things I saw. They aren't wrong, it is a style issue
I believe, but was wondering if there is any advantage or disadvantage to
this approach.

I typically try to write as little code as possible. If I don't have to
use an XSLT element to do something, then why type all the extra code. So
I might do something like this:

<xsl:template match="foo"">
   <newelement att1="a" att2="b">Boilerplate text here</newelement>
</xsl:template>

what I came across today was much more verbose like this:

<xsl:template match="foo">
  <xsl:element anme="newelement">
     <xsl:attribute name="att1">a</xsl:attribute>
     <xsl:attribute name="att2">b</xsl:attribute>
     <xsl:text>boilerplate text here</xsl:text>
  </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

Any comments on either approach? I'll use the xsl:element and xsl:text
constructs when I need to compute something or I'm trying to control the
formatting of text (use of whitespce), but those are real reasons for
using these constructs. When the content is straight forward why would you
go to all the extra work?

..dan