[Web-SIG] Future of WSGI

[Henry Precheur]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 10:50:00PM +0100, Malthe Borch wrote:
> How people use or abuse software is not our concern; but the standard
> library should not itself abuse its own abstractions.

Your assumption is that `environ` == HTTP headers. That's simply NOT the
case. A request is:
  - A request line
  - Some headers
  - A body

(See http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-5)

The request body, the request method (GET, POST, ...), the request URL,
the HTTP version are all in `environ`.

If you really want to separate the headers from the rest you would put
another dictionary containing the headers inside `environ`. Instead WSGI
puts the headers prefixed with HTTP_ in `environ`, because that's what
CGI is doing. It might not be 100% clean, or logic, but it's SIMPLER,
there's no need to deal with nested dictionaries or other more complex
structure, and it's extensible.

>   Request = namedtuple("Request", "environ body")
>   Response = namedtuple("Response", "status headers iterable")
> 
> Iterable might be "body" or "chunks" or some other term.

namedtuple is Python 2.6+: WSGI can't use it. WSGI must work w/ older
versions of Python.

-- 
  Henry Prêcheur