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>Oddly, I share his concerns about HTML parsing, but I think he's wrong to not use an HTML parser and do everything by hand

It looks like he didn't really understand how BeautifulSoup (or for that matter, xpath) works. For example, he seems completely unaware of the '//node' syntax which would completely sidestep the issue of encoding structure in the code.

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And in his defense, someone who has not used BeautifulSoup might not realize how robust it is. I was deeply impressed with it when I used it for a scraping project - it's really good at handling tag soup and giving you powerful access to the parse tree. I would not have expected one tool to perform well in both those areas.

ESR probably just made some assumptions about the capabilities of available parsing options that would be correct but for a few exceptional tools. Let's fault him for not checking his assumptions rather than name-calling about poor programming.

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