For those of us coming to the discussion late, starting with 1.5 jQuery has built-in xml parsing capabilities, which makes it pretty easy to do this without plugins or 3rd party services. It has a parseXml function, and will also auto-parse xml when using the $.get function. E.g.:
$.get(rssurl, function(data) {
var $xml = $(data);
$xml.find("item").each(function() {
var $this = $(this),
item = {
title: $this.find("title").text(),
link: $this.find("link").text(),
description: $this.find("description").text(),
pubDate: $this.find("pubDate").text(),
author: $this.find("author").text()
}
//Do something with item here...
});
});