Comment 1 for bug 1221901

I'm not sure it's worth special casing this specific error - we'd have to make sure the source is actually (and definitely) a reference to a local file, and then check if that exists and raise a different error if not. Might have side effects on other cases, e.g. relative URLs.

I guess I'd consider a patch if you wrote it, but please make sure you include tests that check different types of input URLs/file paths, that work on all operating systems and with Python 2.4 and later, including Python 3. Then open a pull request for it on github.