Some details about the upcoming Flash Player 8 unintentionally left the building and were posted on flexcoders some hours ago. As expected by many, Flash Player 8 will support E4X (ECMAScript for XML), resulting in less code to write (no more firstChild.childNodes[i].firstChild.nodeValue) and better performance. E4X comes with its own path and filtering notation - the samples shown in the posting look very nice.

Although the post refers to Flex 2.0 I believe the whole E4X feature will also apply to "normal" Flash content as it's going to be integrated into the player itself.

Dirk.