urllib: an alternative URLOpener

[Jeremy Hylton]

I've been working on-and-off on a replacement for urllib that is more
easily customizable; they basic philosophy has been to avoid
inheritance as the customization mechanism.  Instead, a single
director class coordinates the activities of many small handlers that
implement one feature/protocol.

The resulting architecture makes it much easier to create a UrlOpener
that handles redirects (which is probably the crucial feature of
FancyUrlOpener) without getting all of the other cruft (like prompting 
the user to enter a password on stdin).

I've been delayed a bit because I wanted to add better support for
proxies, e.g. using a proxy only for URLs that match some pattern.
Since people are asking about this, I'll expedite my release plans
:-).  I'll try to make a useful release available early next week.

Jeremy