Here are some excellent references on walking thru a XML blob with JavaScript. I was a little rusty. The main issue was that every element has a child node that is a text node, even if that text is empty. I was laboring under the misconception that somehow the text portion of an element was something we could get with a method call….as you can with getAttribute(attrName) for example. Not so. I was confusing “elements” with “nodes”. That’s bad.

I’m always looking for API: give me all the methods and attributes in one place so I can use it as a quick reference…this one seems like a decent reference list of methods and properties for nodes in an XML DOM.

IBM developer works usually has good tutorials. This particular one gives you a fast overview of the DOM and especially points out that elements and nodes are not the same. But the code portions are in Java, not JavaScript.    And for some reason its not on developer works anymore.  There is a PDF of it here.