I want to thank everyone for the help, which I found very useful (the parts that I understood :-) ).
Since I think there was some question, it happens that I am working under django and submitting a certain form triggers an html mail. I wanted to validate the html in some of my unit tests. It is only about 30 lines of html so I think I'll take a pass on automated html generation, but FWIW the intolerant parser found a couple of errors. Thanks again, Jim -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list