lxml

Raised as a usability problem by 6 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2013–2026), in 5 threads.

People raised many different problems with lxml, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 6 complaints

DOM structures and manipulation are unintuitive to use in lxml2026-01-23
Namespaces and DOM manipulation are tedious and unintuitive, making simple XML tasks frustrating2026-01-23
Installing it is annoying in some environments, and the API is inconsistent and verbose2018-02-26
Large, complicated API with byzantine docs; unclear which method to use2013-08-23
Hard to get running on Windows, forcing users to fall back to slower libraries2013-04-11
Big library is hard to approach; XPath is hard to learn2013-03-10