[Web-SIG] Request for Comments on upcoming WSGI Changes

[René Dudfield]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 8:31 PM, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> At 11:23 AM 9/21/2009 -0700, Robert Brewer wrote:
>>
>> I still don't see why the environ should have multiple versions of
>> anything. It's not as if the HTTP request gives us multiple Request-URI's.
>> There's a single processing step that has to happen somewhere: decoding the
>> bytes of the Request-URI to unicode. For the vast majority of apps, it
>> should only happen once. Twice is acceptable to me for some apps. As I
>> pointed out in the linked email, doing that as soon as possible (i.e. in the
>> WSGI origin server) allows URI's to be compared as character strings more
>> easily. If you deploy a piece of middleware that transcodes (based on more
>> information than servers want to deal with), it had better be nearly first
>> in the stack so routing works reliably.
>
> The problem with this whole approach is that it's not composable.  You can't
> stick in an application under a router that uses a different method for
> grokking its subtree of the URI space, unless it knows what's been done to
> the URI and can un-do it.
>

It seems latin-1 has the same problem.  If middleware makes an
artbitary change, how can later things know what it's done?