Storing, retrieving and displaying large volumes of text

[jech]

I have a selection of files stored in a specific markup standard, which when combined make up an entire volume of text. The text is available in many different languages and each of these files is duplicated for that language.In order to store, retrieve and then display that information to potentially a lot of users via a web app, I need to implement the most appropriate method. Currently I am thinking along the lines of:Convert files to XML (the markup language was designed to make this easily possible) and then load the relevant file when a user wants to view that section. I am using Rails and Ember.js to display the results and so (I think) require the data to be in JSON format.My questions are:Should I convert the XML to JSON and store that in a file or would it be better to convert the XML each time it is requested?Should I store the data in files or should I move them to a database?Given that each section of the text can have footnotes and other references, if I went down the database route, would it be better to store each section as a field in the table, for each language? Or should each language have it's own table? Should I break that down further and have a table for each section within a language, which then has fields for paragraph, footnotes, references, etc?I'm after answers on the best way to implement this, not the actual method to be able to implement it. Thanks.