[Web-SIG] Python 3.0 and WSGI 1.0.

[P.J. Eby]

At 08:07 AM 5/8/2009 -0700, Robert Brewer wrote:
>I decided that that single type should be byte strings because I want
>WSGI middleware and applications to be able to choose what encoding
>their output is. Passing unicode to the server would require some
>out-of-band method of telling the server which encoding to use per
>response, which seemed unacceptable.

I find the above baffling, since PEP 333 explicitly states that when 
using unicode types, they're not actually supposed to *be* unicode 
--  they're just bytes decoded with latin-1.

So, the server doesn't need to know "what encoding to use" -- it's 
latin-1, plain and simple.  (And it's an error for an application to 
produce a unicode string that can't be encoded as latin-1.)

To be even more specific: an application that produces strings can 
"choose what encoding to use" by encoding in it, then decoding those 
bytes via latin-1.  (This is more or less what Jython and IronPython 
users are doing already, I believe.)