+# a wrapper class around lxml.etree._Element
+# the reason why we need this one is because of the limitations
+# we've found in xpath to address documents with multiple namespaces defined
+# in a nutshell, we deal with xml documents that have
+# a default namespace defined (xmlns="http://default.com/") and specific prefixes defined
+# (xmlns:foo="http://foo.com")
+# according to the documentation instead of writing
+# element.xpath ( "//node/foo:subnode" )
+# we'd then need to write xpaths like
+# element.xpath ( "//{http://default.com/}node/{http://foo.com}subnode" )
+# which is a real pain..
+# So just so we can keep some reasonable programming style we need to manage the
+# namespace map that goes with the _Element (its internal .nsmap being
+# unmutable)
+
+