ugh. the good news is that I can write some clever xpath that makes this SVG-manipulation trivial

the bad news is that I'm having to use ElementTree, which has "limited support for XPath expressions", so NOPE! my xpath won't work

@foone lxml.etree has a full xpath and a compatible API, mostly: https://lxml.de/xpathxslt.html#xpath
XPath and XSLT with lxml

@foone (I know this really depends on the context of "having to use")
@glyph yeah. I actually prototyped this with lxml first, and then had to backport to elementtree later because I can't use lxml in this context.