[Web-SIG] So what's missing?

[Bill Janssen]

Apropos Ian's comments today, I'd like to suggest that at this stage
we focus on what's missing, rather than on how to fix/change things.
What have you needed that isn't in the standard libraries?  Here's my
list:

Client-side:

* CSS parser.  I can't really do visual interpretation of Web pages
  without understanding their layout.

* post-multipart (both http and https).

* Asynchronous fetch.  When working over the Plucker distiller, which
  is a web crawler of sorts, I really wanted a higher-powered client
  side HTTP library.  In particular, I wanted to be able to start a
  fetch, go on to other things, and come back to the fetch
  periodically, checking to see whether there was data available.

* Connection caching.  Again, when pulling lots of pages from lots of
  sites, I want to be able to save the open connection to a host/port
  combo and re-use it, if the server doesn't kill the connection.
  There should be a pool of connections, with a user-settable limit,
  so that we don't run out of sockets/file-descriptors.

* Anything else I can do with cURL to an HTTP or HTTPS URL.

Server-side:

* Server-side SSL support in the socket module, and some interface to
  management of certificates/identities for SSL.  I want to build
  HTTPS servers with Python.

* Some kind of response object usable in CGI scripts.  This would make
  a few simple actions simple: write a response as a file (instead of
  using sys.stdout), return an error with a message, redirect to
  another URL, return a file.

* A standard server framework on the order of Medusa.  This should
  support a standalone Python web server, with the ability to serve
  files, and the ability to add new handlers.  Not sure it has to
  support CGI invocation.

What else are we missing?

Bill