`lxml.html.HTMLParser` is specially [meant for HTML](http://lxml.de/lxmlhtml.html) and the main difference seems to be the [helpers for links](http://lxml.de/lxmlhtml.html#html-element-methods). I don't think it would make that much of a difference (but I have no proof).

But if we say that `.iterlinks` doesn't fit our needs in the end, we may not need it at all.

And @dangra as you mention parsing performance, I'd be thrilled to have some performance tests in scrapy, if only to validate/invalidate my beloved [compiled XPath expressions](https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy/pull/471) :)