Musing over a recently asked question, I started to wonder if there is a really simple way to deal with XML documents in Python. A pythonic way, if you will.
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If you haven't already, I'd suggest looking into the DOM API for Python. DOM is a pretty widely used XML interpretation system, so it should be pretty robust.
It's probably a little more complicated than what you describe, but that comes from its attempts to preserve all the information implicit in XML markup rather than from bad design.