So what can you do with this XML once you've created and stored it? Make it into pretty well anything you want, that's what!

You can get a very, very long way with a single toolset: XSL.

The XSL family of standards includes:

• XSLT: transformation of XML to "other stuff"
• XPath: the XML path language
• XSL-FO: XSL formatting objects

These standards are widely supported, e.g. many of the editors support XSLT transformations; some have XPath searches. There are free implementations of all of them.