> <document xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> Yup, you have to do this. Only the "xml" and "xmlns" prefixes are special; all others must be declared and -- as you found in your getAttributeNS call -- you must use the URI internally. You might want to look at the ns.py module, which defines symbolic names for many well-known XML uri's. We can always add more, too. /r$