Just my opinion but I feel it should be stated...

It is not Philips' responsibility to teach you ECMAScript nor is it their responsibility to educate you on the nuances of ECMA-357.

Now, OPINION OFF!!!!

I'm glad to see you found the XML constructor. I did not even think about this as I presumed you'd know to use this if you could not do inline variable declaration.

XML manipulation via ECMA has its own quirks. Just be glad you did not have namespace qualified data in your document. If you did, you'd be accessing nodes via namespaces.

I have encountered this because I, too wrote a module to access Yahoo/Weather Channel RSS xml feed and had to access data from various namespaces to make this work. It can be done rather easily and quite nicely. But, it does take some time getting used to working with XML namespaces in ECMA. For further reading, search the ECMA357 PDF for the string "set default namespace".