[Web-SIG] Clarifications on Python 3.0 and WSGI.

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:54 PM 3/25/2008 +1100, Graham Dumpleton wrote:
>Why are servers and gateways being made to accept strings when the
>preference is for applications to produce bytes for both? Is this
>acknowledgment that getting people to convert WSGI applications to
>produce bytes may be a problem?

Yep.

>The text of (2) sorts of suggests there is justification for this in
>saying 'under the existing rules (i.e., s.encode('latin-1') must
>convert the string to bytes without an exception', but I can't find
>such a rule in the WSGI PEP when I have a quick look. In other words,
>where in the existing specification does it say that Unicode strings
>must be accepted, to the contrary it suggests they can't be and that
>using them where a string object is expected is undefined.

It says that in versions of Python where 'str is unicode' (i.e. 
Jython, IronPython, and Python 3000), then the specification should 
be read to define "string" as a unicode string whose characters can 
be expressed in latin-1.

Really, adding support for bytes is the stretch here.  In fact, I'd 
almost go so far as to say the heck with bytes support except for the 
response body.  I could easily consider headers to be text, instead.