Interesting change in AS3. I'm using AS2 and flash 8 right now, I don't know anything about AS3 yet, thanks for the response/info!

I think I have decided to go attribute heavy and node light. Less farting around on the AS side, and only a little more annoyance on the PHP side to generate the xml. In the end I don't really care if the php is ugly looking as I should not have to deal with it very often once it does what it is told.

In the end I think I was overthinking it, and getting way too verbose in what I wanted to include in the xml. I had map nodes, and location nodes, and initialization nodes (since this flash will start out differently depending on some url data), etc...

Instead I think I will break it into a few xml files and just request the ones I need when I need them instead of sending a ton of data that the user may not even request.

I went from thinking I would have to do an elaborate loop with loadvars as needed to learning some xml and that ballooned into this insane urge to dump my entire database into the xml file whether I really need that data or not.