lxml is an alternative, more Pythonic binding for the libxml2 and
libxslt XML processing libraries.
lxml 0.6 contains important bugfixes, in particular better namespace support
while handling attributes, as well as a fix for what turned out to be totally
broken behavior for etree.tostring(). An upgrade is recommended.
Phillip chats about the problems for which Java programmers naturally turn to XML, and Python programmers to .... Python.
I particularly like Phillip on using XML:
XML is not the answer. It is not even the question. To paraphrase Jamie Zawinski on regular expressions, "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use XML.' Now they have two problems."
This is a different situation than in Java, because compared to Java code, XML is agile and flexible. Compared to Python code, XML is a boat anchor, a ball and chain. In Python, XML is something you use for interoperability, not your core functionality, because you simply don't need it for that.