Hi, since I was rewriting the tree iterator anyway, I stumbled over the fact that ElementTree's getiterator() can filter for any tag ("*"), but not for any tag within a namespace ("{namespace}*"). Since this is just a cheap and straight forward little extension to the node filter (and a pretty nice feature to have), I added that to lxml and hope for inclusion in a future ElementTree version also (or maybe a hint why Fredrik assumes this to be inappropriate). Note that it's not currently supported in findall, though, as we use the same implementation as ElementTree there. Stefan