[Web-SIG] Move to bless Graham's WSGI 1.1 as official spec

[Henry Precheur]

On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 10:17:09AM +0100, Manlio Perillo wrote:
> It is just as simple as using byte strings, IMHO.

No, it's not. There were lots of dicussions regarding this on the
mailing list. One of the main issue is that the standard library
supports bytes poorly. urllib for example expects strings not bytes.

> > * WSGI sticks to what RFC 2616 (Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1)
> >   says. WSGI is about HTTP, but that doesn't necessarily includes all
> >   other standards extending HTTP.
> > 
> 
> HTTP never says to consided whole headers as latin-1 text, IMHO.

It does:

  When no explicit charset parameter is provided by the sender, media
  subtypes of the "text" type are defined to have a default charset value
  of "ISO-8859-1" when received via HTTP.

  http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-3.7.1

> Yes, but it is quite stupid to first convert to Unicode and then convert
> again to byte string.

99% of the time latin-1 will work. And converting from Unicode to bytes
is not costly.

6 months ago I was a big fan of bytes, but bytes create more problems
than they solve.

-- 
  Henry Prêcheur