Containing an XML nodevalue with jQuery

My Predicament:

I have some things on my server that I want to connect with an AJAX call:

• an XML file

• an HTML test index

• a folder full of HTML copy

• some jQuery script

The XML holds the relative addresses of the HTML copy. The jQuery is supposed to grab that nodevalue and some DIVs I have on the test index page. Ultimately, the index page is supposed to update some of its HTML without a full reload, like what my AJAX studying has said would happen.

Unfortunately, I have almost no idea what I'm doing.

This is what I'm working with:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $('#header').click(function(){
        $('p#test').html('At least <em>this</em> works');    
        $.ajax({
            type: "GET",
            url: "archives.xml",
            datatype: "xml",
            success: function(xml){
                $('div#viewer').append($(this).find('title')).text();
            }
        });
    });
});

My AJAX call doesn't do anything. I can tell I'm doing something wrong, but at this point I'm just happy I stamped out the DOM 4 errors and Unexpected Token Errors.

And here's the test XML I'm trying to call and navigate and take data from:

<archives>
    <entry>
        <date>
            <year>2011</year>
            <month>April</month>
            <day>1</day>
        </date>
        <title>Trees!</title>
        <deck>and something that definitely isn't a tree</deck>
        <source>./copy/1april2011.html</source>
    </entry>
</archives>

What I already know:

• I know javascript can't access a local filesystem. These are all issues I'm running into online.

• jQuery selectors supposedly don't play nice with the XML DOM? At least that's what I gathered from various blogs from the last five or six years out there.

• I know about JSON, but I'm having a hard time translating from XML to JSON. The whole braces and brackets syntax is a bit confusing.

Questions:

• What's wrong with my success function? It mimics tutorials I've read, but I've clearly got something wrong.

• Once I've got hold of a value f开发者_如何学Gorom the XML, can I contain that value in a variable in such a way that functions outside the AJAX call are able to read it?

jquery selectors a are not meant for parsing the xml wrapping the xml in jquery object and parsing it that way is browser dependent use .parseXML instead

here is a demo http://jsfiddle.net/AKJwF/3/

$(document).ready(function(){
    $('#header').click(function(){
        $('p#test').html('At least <em>this</em> works');    
        $.ajax({
            type: "GET",
            url: "archives.xml",
            datatype: "xml",
            success: function(xml){
             xmlDoc = $.parseXML( xml ),
             $xml = $( xmlDoc ),
             $title = $xml.find( "title" ).text();
                $('div#viewer').append($title);
            }
        });
    });
});