[python-advocacy] Python makes the "most wanted list"

[Doug Hellmann]

I agree that adding documentation to encourage the use of a User-Agent  
header won't make much difference, and that forcing the developer to  
provide a "useful" value is going too far.  The source of the hits on  
the W3C site is bone-headed scripts that use regexes or other  
incorrect methods for finding links in HTML.  Neither of these  
solution addresses this problem anyway, because the problem isn't that  
we can't find the author of the bone-headed scripts, the problem is  
that the scripts are out there in the first place.

There's not a lot we can do about existing programs, but adding a  
function to the standard library to properly parse out the links would  
solve the problem for new code, since most developers would use it  
rather than writing their own.

Doug