[Web-SIG] URL quoting in WSGI (or the lack therof)

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:15 AM 1/23/2008 -0800, Robert Brewer wrote:
>I consider it a bug in both, and the difficulty level of changing the
>CGI behavior really has no bearing on our decision to do better with
>WSGI. I think it's important that we allow the full range of URI's to be
>accepted. If you go and stick Apache in front of your WSGI app, it will
>still 404, sure; but that's your choice to use Apache or not. There's no
>sense making WSGI a least common denominator, inheriting all the
>limitations of all the existing web servers.

Uh, actually, that's sort of the whole point of WSGI - to allow 
portable applications.  If the spec allows you to do something in 
theory that's almost never allowed in practice, that's not very helpful.

I don't consider WSGI's CGI compatibility on this point to be an 
error, in other words.  An application that expects to receive 
encoded URLs is going to be *very* limited in its deployment choices, 
and needs to find its own way of dealing with this.

MoinMoin, for example, has its own encoding scheme for handling 
pseudo-slashes in paths, and IMO it's a better way to handle it than 
trying to rely on finding a server that supports *not* decoding URLs.