I've heard many people complain about how hard it is to write XML. I agree, and that's why I don't write it. I generate it. My tool for generating XML? The libxml2 library from Gnome, of course?
I'm working on a project to generate XML directly from SQL queries - how cool would that be? Its called dbrs2xml.
Once data is in XML, it can be used in so many different ways. It can be transformed with XSL, for example, to a variety of other formats: more XML, HTML, XHTML, plain text, even PDF!