One question: In the example to get all the anchors (links) with a class named “josh”, what if the class attribute was qualified? I’ve yet to come up with a solution.

Also, with regards to namespaces, don’t forget you can use wildcards, as in:

var temp:int = rss.channel.item.*::condition.@temp;

it looks like ‘use namespace’ performs the same way

By “block level”, do you mean that it could be scoped to an if statement or any other block, unlike local variables which are always scoped to a function?

if (feedXML.namespace("") != undefined){
    default xml namespace = feedXML.namespace("");
}

This sets your default namespace to the default of the xml your loading. I think it might be more effective then ‘use namespace’ as its got block level scope and is for xml namespaces in particular.