Finally figured this out... something obvious as usual. I had to set the content type to text/xml for that the post request was receiving. Duh, after that, it was easy. I also read somewhere that jQuery dropped support for xpath, I'm fine with that, the DOM seems to fit better with client side work.
I'm sticking with XML because I'm such a huge fan of it. JSON looks cool, but I'm happy with XML. Anyway, here's the code I got working:
$.post("http://www.example.com/blah",
{
'barfy': 'blah'
},
function (data){
alert( ($("menu",data).attr("id")));
});
Then the magnificient XML document which is sent to the jQuery ajax client:
<menu id="hi"> blah</menu>
This will result in "hi" getting alerted. For the "blah" value, you'd use ($("menu",data).text()) as the DOM locator. The "data" text is in the jQuery ()'s because it is "context" of the reference, otherwise the query would be looking for menu in the existing page.
¥