The best way to do xml it, quotation marks or the other way

In XML <name =”John”> is not syntactically correct. It should be something like this

<person name="John"></person>

Then person is called element and name is called the attribute of the element person. As said in the question the other way of doing this is

<person>
    <name>John</name>
</person>

Here, name is the child element of the element person.
Both, give the information. There are no hard and fast rules regarding when to use as an attribute and when to use as child element. But, as a general the attribute can be used when the information concerned describes something about the element concerned, like an adjective describes about a noun. On the other hand an element can be used when the information concerned is like data.
The other difference is that if it is represented as an element then it can nest other elements and also can have attributes. But, if it is given as an attribute then it cannot have child elements and other attributes.
An explanation is given here
http://www.w3schools.com/dtd/dtd_el_vs_attr.asp[^]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7f0tkwcx(v=vs.80).aspx[^]
I think it may be helpful.