title: How do I create a Selenium Webdriver test to verify an element is not present?
body: <p>I am creating unit tests for my Django app in Selenium Webdriver.</p>
  
  <p>I have an AJAX method that deletes a Topic from the database.
  I'm trying to figure out how to verify that the deleted Topic is no longer present on the page.</p>
  
  <p>I am trying to catch the Exception that the should be generated when Webdriver can't find an element:
  selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchAttributeException  </p>
  
  <p>Instead I see an error:  </p>
  
  <pre><code>*** URLError: &lt;urlopen error timed out&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here is how I have setup the tests:  </p>
  
  <pre><code>from selenium import webdriver
  from django.utils import unittest  
  
  class TestAuthentication(unittest.TestCase):    
      scheme = 'http'    
      host = 'localhost'    
      port = '4444'    
  
  
      def setUp(self):    
          self._driver = webdriver.Firefox()    
          self._driver.implicitly_wait(10)    
  
      def login_as_Kallie(self):    
          # Kallie has manual login    
          self._driver.get('http://localhost:8000/account/signin/')    
          user = self._driver.find_element_by_id('id_username')    
          user.send_keys("Kallie")    
          password = self._driver.find_element_by_id('id_password')    
          password.send_keys('*********')    
          submit = self._driver.find_element_by_id('blogin')    
          submit.click()    
  
      def test_Kallie_can_delete_topic(self):    
          self.login_as_Kallie()    
          self._driver.find_element_by_link_text("Topic to delete").click()    
          self._driver.find_element_by_xpath("/html/body/div/div[4]/div/div/div[2]/div/table/tbody/tr/td[2]/div/div[3]/span[5]/a").click()    
          self._driver.find_element_by_class_name('dialog-yes').click()    
          self._driver.get("http://localhost:8000/questions/")    
          # this is the Python exception to catch: selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchAttributeException    
          self.assertRaises('selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchAttributeException', self._driver.find_element_by_link_text("Topic to delete"))    
  
      def tearDown(self):    
          self._driver.quit()    
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I test that a Element of the page is absent?   </p>