Hacker News Reader

CSS selectors are much easier to remember than XPath. Python's BeautifulSoup allows you to select elements with selectors and is very convenient. XPath is a bit more verbose and most people already are familiar with CSS syntax.

View on HN

And indeed, any CSS selector can be converted to an equivalent XPath query, at least for selectors on XML and HTML. http://pythonhosted.org/cssselect/ is a Python implementation of such a conversion. (Note that there is no XPath to CSS selector converter, as XPath can express certain things CSS selectors cannot, as CSS selectors are designed such that they can be matched using a streaming parser as soon as the first child of the element appears.)

I'd say more than a bit. When you have multiple namespaces in your xml it can become so verbose that it's hard to see the signal through the noise. But then, maybe there's a way to reduce that noise in a way that I don't understand.

Long comment short, I agree. CSS selectors are easier to understand and read.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com