I agree, I'm not sure that I understand the underlying question. You're trying to pull in some variable data from an HTTP server ... and the file you're getting is HTML or XML?

I mean this doesn't sound too different from what's been done in the weather scripts. My script was recently posted and pulls in XML from weather.com and loads it up. It gives examples of how to references the XML using E4X (absolutely beautiful if you've ever done JS where you had to parse down using DOM references ... ugh).

Some more clarity on the actual challenge you're trying to solve would be helpful.