[lxml-dev] About lxml status

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

Stefan Behnel wrote:
[snip]
> lxml does not implement the DOM API either. Instead, as the cheeseshop page
> nicely states:
> 
> ---------------------
> lxml is a Pythonic binding for the libxml2 and libxslt libraries. It provides
> safe and convenient access to these libraries using the ElementTree API.

Note that the ElementTree API is a developing Python standard, 
implemented by 3 separate libraries, ElementTree, cElementTree and lxml. 
ElementTree and cElement have become part of the core Python 
distribution as of Python 2.5.

A lot of ElementTree documentation can be found here:

http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm

You can do common DOM-style manipulations through this API, just in a 
more convenient manner.

As to XPath and XSLT support, lxml has that, including the ability to 
create extension functions and the like. There are differences in 
feature set here and there, but overall lxml should be able to compete 
with 4Suite.

Regards,

Martijn