The findall method for ElementTree.Element handles namespace prefixes by tokenising the path and inserting the full namespace in braces based on entries in a dictionary.

Unfortunately, this does not work for a namespace without a prefix, so if you have files containing namespaces with and without prefixes, you still need to manually add the namespace url for the unprefixed path.

The function xpath_tokenizer checks to see if tokens contain a colon and only adds in the namespace url in that instance.

This could be changed to add the url if their is a colon, or if there is not, and the empty string key is present in the namespaces dictionary.