[staticautomatic]

Thanks for humoring my post with a real answer.

1. I never realized there was a function that just returned an instance of the class. Should've just looked it up myself.

2. I was wrong and misread the header stuff.

3. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just a convention I'm not accustomed to seeing or using. Admittedly, there are lots of ways to skin a cat with optional and default args.

4. Yeah I understand what you're saying. I guess it's a fine "greasemonkey" approach. Just more susceptible to DOM changes and code errors than I'm comfy with even for a rudimentary implementation.

I agree you'd usually want to get an error than an empty list but I think it's a little more complicated than just whether you want an error or an empty list. Sometimes you want the error but don't get it, which is why I tend to write more code around checking stuff and catching exceptions. I think the best example is you might not see an index error but the list item that's returned for your specified index isn't actually what you wanted because the DOM changed or you wrote code against one page that broke on another one you thought would be identical.