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

René Dudfield renesd at gmail.com
Tue Sep 22 11:26:30 CEST 2009


On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 10:06 AM, Alan Kennedy <alan at xhaus.com> wrote:
> [Alan]
>>> Is there a real need out there?
>
> [Armin]
>> In python 3, yes.  Because the stdlib no longer works with bytes and the
>> bytes object has few string semantics left.
>
> Why can't we just do the same as the java servlet spec? I.E.
>
> 1. Ignore the encoding issues being discussed
> 2. Give the programmer (possibly mojibake) unicode strings in the WSGI
> environ anyway
> 3. And let them solve their problems themselves, using server
> configuration or bespoke middleware
>
> [Alan]
>>> Java programmers just tolerate this, although they may curse the
>>> developers of the servlet spec for not having solved their specific
>>> problem for them.
>
> [Armin]
>> Many Java apps are also still using latin1 only or have all kinds of
>> problems with charsets.
>
> My point exactly.
>
> Many web developers simply never have to deal with these issues,
> perhaps a majority.
>
> The ones that do have to sort it out for themselves.
>
> To do so, the publishers of the various containers give them
> (non-standard) options to control the decoding of the incoming request
> and all of its component parts: you cited the Tomcat approach above.
> Other containers do it differently. Which means that i18n knowledge is
> not portable between containers.
>
> It would be nice if we could avoid such a situation with i18n and WSGI.
>
> But I suppose I'm a little dubious that this group can out-do the
> enormous java community, and the enormous financial resources that
> Sun, IBM, Oracle, etc, etc, plough into it. And still failed to solve
> this complex problem satisfactorily.
>
> Alan.


I think it's worth discussing and working something out that's good
(good in various ways).

As this is a python group, I think most of us think python does a
whole bunch of things better than java(maybe wrongly... but still)
;-)

cu,


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