First thing we can do is putthe akax call into a ready function to be handled at the time of onload. And now let's add the url where the xml feed lives and write up the processing of the returned value "data" The naming of data could be any word you choose. To handle the feed I created a loop(each) to grab selected content from the feed before displaying it. In the loop the attribute "item" is every parent xml node that contains the content(child nodes) and then we process those item nodes and search for the content we are going to display. Then we write it to the document.

    $(document).ready(
        function(){

            $.ajax({

              url: 'sample.xml',
              dataType: 'xml',

              success: function(data) {

                 // Manipulate the returned data here or elsewhere
                $(data).find('item').each(function(i) {

                    title = $(this).find('title').text();

                    description = $(this).find('description').text();

                    $('.box').append(title + "<br />" + description + "<br /><br />");
                });

              }
        });
    });

This is a very simple example and works pretty well. There are many other options and arguments you can add to the actual call to ajax() such as cache, error, complete, type and more. But this is all we needed to get started.

Try it here and view source to see the code if you like. I hope this helps.

You can view the simple and basic xml document here.