I guess I really do skip over who the submitter is when checking out HN links...if this submission had been titled, "Rvest: Easy web scraping R library by Hadley Wickham", I would've immediately been non-skeptical.
It looks like rvest intends to be the equivalent of Mechanize, with stateful navigation in the works. Is there an R equivalent to just Beautiful Soup or Nokogiri?
What are you looking for? rvest should support all the navigation tools from beautiful soup/nokogiri (unless I've missed something), but currently doesn't have any support for modifying the document (in which case I think your only option is the XML package).
It looks like rvest intends to be the equivalent of Mechanize, with stateful navigation in the works. Is there an R equivalent to just Beautiful Soup or Nokogiri?