New submission from Mitchell Model <m...@acm.org>: The documentation of ElementTree mentions "path" in describing the arguments to certain methods. However, "path" is never defined. I realize that a "path" is (at least a partial implementation of) an XPath, but there's nothing in the documentation to suggest that to someone who is not aware of XPath. I also realize that there is a reference to the external ElementTree documentation, and that ElementTree support for XPath is documented there. I think "path" should at least be clarified with a reference that says something like "As used here the term 'path' refers to ElementTree's support for the XML Path Language (XPath); see see http://effbot.org/zone/element-xpath.htm fordetails"
Next, a swarm of nits: The documentation of the Element methods find, findall, and findtext say that their arguments can be a tag name or path. (Using the same wording, which makes it strange that the argument to findtext is called "condition" while the argument to the other two methods are called "match". I'm sure there's something important about this distinction, but I can't figure it out from the documentation. The documentation of the corresponding methods of ElementTree call the arguments "path", rather than "tag" or "condition". The real problem is that these methods are documented with respect to the element(s) "with the given tag". [The "the" is missing from the documentation of ElementTree.find and findall.] The documentation says these methods are the same as calling the corresponding method on getroot(), but whereas the Element methods refer to tag name or path, the ElementTree methods, although they call their arguments "path", only mention tag names. Finally, the ElementTree methods say "path is the [top-level] element to look for", which, it seems to me, is redundant given the first sentence of each of each method's documentation. ---------- assignee: georg.brandl components: Documentation messages: 90528 nosy: MLModel, georg.brandl severity: normal status: open title: ElementTree documentation refers to "path" with no explanation, and inconsistently versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.0, Python 3.1, Python 3.2 _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue6488> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
