How would libxml fit into this picture ?

Uncertain. I could find out the following facts: Python Wrappers: Dave Kuhlmann has written some, see http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman/ Licensing: Available through either LGPL or W3C IPR (Daniel Veillard from Redhat is the maintainer, he used to work for the W3C). Portability: Apparently tested on Unix and Win32. Uses zlib and iconv when available. Size: 85kLOC C source code (compare to 11kLOC in Expat) Performance: I could not find any results on this subject, comparing libxml with other parsers. Regards, Martin