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I am testing against the following test document: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>hi there</title> </head> <body> <img class="foo" src="bar.png"/> </body> </html> If I parse the document using lxml.html, I can get the IMG with an xpath just fine: >>> root = lxml.html.fromstring(doc) >>> root.xpath("//img") [<Element img at 1879e30>] However, if I parse the document as XML and try to get the IMG tag, I get an empty result: >>> tree = etree.parse(StringIO(doc)) >>> tree.getroot().xpath("//img") [] I can navigate to the element directly: >>> tree.getroot().getchildren()[1].getchildren()[0] <Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}img at f56810> But of course that doesn't help me process arbitrary documents. I would also expect to be able to query etree to get an xpath expression that will directly identify this element, which, technically I can do: >>> tree.getpath(tree.getroot().getchildren()[1].getchildren()[0]) '/*/*[2]/*' >>> tree.getroot().xpath('/*/*[2]/*') [<Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}img at fa1750>] But that xpath is, again, obviously not useful for parsing arbitrary documents. Obviously I am missing some key issue here, but I don't know what it is. My best guess is that it has something to do with namespaces but the only namespace defined is the default and I don't know what else I might need to consider in regards to namespaces. So, what am I missing?

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