Usually you feed your xml data to an xslt processor that uses an xslt template to render the results into the format you wish.
Your XML should have a dtd block at the top which defines the format used by the xml document. From that, you can generate your template because the dtd specifies the fields, formats, etc.
However, there are very few places that actually use xml, so, the first question would be: What is it that you are trying to accomplish?
Are you trying to convert RSS to something? or is it truely an XML datastream?
As for how to put URLs in, !CDATA is usually the preferred method to make things so that they are ignored by the xslt processor, but, if you are having problems with & in your links, remember that xml requires entities rather than the raw & and expects & in the url.
http://www.xml.com has quite a decent set of reference links if you are truely trying to parse xml.