Only in Python 3.0.
We better start early to ever reach the point of making a clear distinction between text and binary data in P3k.
The introduction of a bytes type in Python 2.5 should be a good start.
But even so, deriving from Unicode (or str) means the template class inherits a lot of unwanted operations. While I can see that concatenating templates probably works, slicing them or converting to lowercase etc. make no sense. IMO the standard Template class should implement a "narrow" interface, i.e. *only* the template expansion method (__mod__ or something else), so it's clear that other compatible template classes shouldn't have to implement anything besides that. This avoids the issues we have with the mapping protocol: when does an object implement enough of the mapping API to be usable? That's currently ill-defined; sometimes, __getitem__ is all you need, sometimes __contains__ is required, sometimes keys, rarely setdefault.
Looks like it's ont even clear what templating itself should mean... you're talking about a templating interface here, not an object type, like Barry is (for the sake of making Templates compatible to i18n tools like gettext).
I don't know zip about i18n or gettext. But I thought we had plenty of time since Barry has offered to withdraw the PEP 292 implementation for 2.4? -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) Ask me about gmail.