XML is just a nice way to represent data, you should create your preferred format for the document (choosing tags, attributes, etc). XML gives the advantage that can be easily be transformed from a format to another using XSLT, and is independent from the presentation (today you can transform your XML data to HTML, tomorrow in any other format will appear). To parse an XML document (for example a string or an InputStream) you can use one of most common parsers that give you a DOM object (a tree of objects that can be browsed programmatically to understand the document's content).