A critique of cgi.escape

[Jon Ribbens]

In article <mailman.563.1159190394.10491.python-list at python.org>, Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> If you're really serious about making things easier to use, shouldn't
> you look at the whole picture?  HTML documents are byte streams, so
> any transformation from internal character data to HTML must take both
> escaping and encoding into account.

Ever heard of modular programming? I would suggest that you do indeed
take a step back and look at the whole picture - it's the whole
picture that needs to take escaping and encoding into account. There's
nothing to say that cgi.escape should take them both into account in
the one function, and in fact as you yourself have already commented,
good reasons for it not to, in that it would make it excessively
complicated.  

> If you and Lawrence have a hard time remembering how to use the
> existing cgi.escape function, despite it's utter simplicity, surely
> it would make your life even easier if there was an alternative API
> that would handle both the easy part (escaping) and the hard part
> (encoding) ?

You seem to be arguing that because, in an ideal world, it would be
better to throw away the 'cgi' module completely and start again, it
is not worth making minor improvements in what we already have. 
I would suggest that this is, to put it mildly, not a good argument.

> I've already explained that, but since you're convinced that your use
> case is more important than other use cases, and you don't care about
> things like stability and respect for existing users of an API, nor
> the cost for others to update their code and unit tests, I don't see
> much need to repeat myself.

You are merely compounding your bad manners. All of your above
allegations are outright lies. I am not sure if you are simply not
understanding the simple points I am making, or are deliberately
trying to mislead people for some bizarre reason of your own.

> Breaking things just because you think you can simply isn't the
> Python way of doing things.

Your hyperbole is growing more extravagant. To begin with, you were
claiming that the suggested change would make things (minisculely)
less efficient, now you're claiming it will "break" unspecified
things. What precisely do you think it would "break"?