which is quicker? pseudo XML, or database?

Hi all, I'm looking at a site where there will be a lot of articles, all of which will be added once, and rarely edited again... Let's say each article consisted of 6 data types: - id - author - authorEmail - datePublished - introduction - bodyText I'm considering: a) storing this data in a MySQL table (a fairly simple query) b) storing this data in a pseudo XML format like: <id>24</id> <author>Justin French</author> <author_email>foo@example.com</author_email> <date_published>2003-11-28</date_published> <intro>This is my intro</intro> <body>This is my text and html -- say 1000 words?</body> I plan on doing my own performance tests, but I'd love to hear any opinions about which would form of data retrieval would cause less of a performance burden on the server (MySQL is on the same box as the htdocs and apache). TIA, Justin