on second thought, i had tricked myself with a boolean with that. that object isn't reading that variable at all; my testing was built around a false positive.

as mentioned previously, i'm not interested in doing error handling or writing a complicated script. i want this to be very, very simple and clean, so i need to find the right bit.

if i could get it to read the type attribute, but it doesn't want do that, either.

i'm sure there's an easy answer. i need to figure that out by the end of the night.