Since cssselect is an external dependency, I'd like to avoid adding it to more places. I consider the cssselect() method in lxml.html unnecessary myself and think that people should use the lxml.cssselect module directly. It's also much more efficient to use pre-compiled CSS selectors.

Most developers are more familiar with css/jquery selectors.

For example I was not aware, that this is a valid xpath selector:

  //mytag[@myattr="myval"]

Are the newcomer friendly docs for xpath? I don't want to read detailed specs,
I want to read some simple cookbook style examples.

Looks like you misunderstood what I said. I actually like cssselect a lot and am well aware of its merits.

Ok, I would accept a pull request that adds a cssselect() method to the lxml.etree._Element class to make it more visible.

I would also accept a pull request that improves the documentation to help people find it more easily by presenting lxml.cssselect.CSSSelector() more prominently in comparison to XPath(). Note: not the method, just the selector. Calling the method is too inefficient to encourage its use, but I'm sure some people will prefer simplicity over efficiency.

Hi scoder,

I am new to lxml. That's why I have not understood you 100% up to now.

Please provide an example of your preferred way to use a css selector (source code example).

thank you

Implemented here:
https://github.com/lxml/lxml/commit/7d8a55cb4b4ee95d84aa33368c9e79162fbc5cbd

Wow, great support.
Thank you very much!

Released in lxml 3.5.0.

Thank you 🙂