A question about xml and reading data

Lets say when you have a news component like so or something similar:

http://flashden.net/item/xml-news-2/full_screen_preview/18160

which reads text and all the stuff from a xml file.

So at the beggining you load xml file.

But what to do with all the data?

(especially large text files)

Do you store it in the arrays or simply when you need certain item you simply point to it in the xml file like so:

myXML.someItem.@description;