Off-topic: Plain text, XML or LaTex?

[Mac]

I apologize for this off-topic posting. But I really like to know how
you fellow Emacsien feal about his.

I like plain text, and have for a long time used outline-mode to write
both my own private notes as well as draft documents. I have also for
a long time been thinking about moving to LaTex so that I also can
produce my final documents in Emacs as well.

Now I have an opportunity to move to XML instead. So I would
appreciate your thoughts about this.

How can I get up-to speed with writing XML inside Emacs? Is it worth
it, or should I stick with plain-ol-text? Any pointers to tutorials,
books etc is appreciated.

Perhaps you have a completely different setup that you are willing to
share with me?

/mac

One reason for liking plain text is it's portability (but so are eg
.pdf these days). Another is version control, I'm a heavy user of cvs
(pcl-cvs is *great*).