homepage

I think this may be intentional. Absolute searches on a ElementTree are discouraged with a warning:
 def find(self, path, namespaces=None):
 # assert self._root is not None
 if path[:1] == "/":
 path = "." + path
 warnings.warn(
 "This search is broken in 1.3 and earlier, and will be "
 "fixed in a future version. If you rely on the current "
 "behaviour, change it to %r" % path,
 FutureWarning, stacklevel=2
 )
 return self._root.find(path, namespaces)
See what happens when an "absolute path" is attemped? The code just hacks it into a relative path and prints a menacing warning.
So, I would not change the documentation at this point. However, the problem should go away if and when the XPath support is improved to really support absolute paths.