Reading Certain XML Nodes Using Tags?

I remember seeing a tutorial on reading XML somewhere and took no notice of it because I have my own way of doing things. In this tutorial the author outlined a basic way of reading certain XML nodes using tags

For example,

<Root>
<Person tag = 1>
<name>John</name>

[Code].....

Now in his example one would be able to navigate to John's "person" node by using the tag value. I had hoped I would never have to venture away from my warm and comfortable way of working with XML but because of an annoying datagrid and uncooperative XML format I've had to rethink things.