The Element type is a simple but flexible container object, designed to store hierarchical data structures, such as simplified XML infosets, in memory. The ElementTree package provides a Python implementation of this type, plus code to serialize element trees to and from XML files. ElementTree 1.2.1 is 1.2 plus some performance improvements that have been backported from the 1.3 development version. The new release is 20-30% faster than 1.2, on many kinds of XML documents. You can get the ElementTree toolkit from: http://effbot.org/downloads Brief documentation and some code samples (including an XML-RPC unmarshaller in 16 lines) are available from: http://effbot.org/zone/element.htm enjoy /F