url parsing on in-house schemes

[rw2]

I followed the general convention of scheme://host/path in creation
of new schemes, but neither urlparse nor urllib want to parse our new
creations.  This is understandable as the RFC says that everything after
the colon is scheme dependent, but I'd like to know if there's a way to
coax either of them to use scheme://host/path as a default instead of
throwing an exception (urllib) or putting the host in the path (urlparse)