[Web-SIG] Getting back to WSGI grass roots.

[And Clover]

Graham wrote:

> So, rather than throw away completely the idea of bytes everywhere,
> and rewrite the WSGI specification, we could instead say that the
> existing conceptual idea of WSGI 1.0 is still valid, and just build on
> top of it a translation interface to present that as unicode.

I don't think we really need to. Almost nothing in WSGI itself actually 
touches Unicode. HTTP headers may in theory be ISO-8859-1 (and certainly 
should be handled as such), but in the real world they are exclusively 
ASCII (anything else breaks browsers).

SCRIPT_NAME/PATH_INFO is the only part of the spec that potentially 
needs more than ASCII, and even then the majority of apps don't put any 
Unicode characters in those (especially SCRIPT_NAME). I don't think it's 
worth adding the complication of a two-layer interface just for this one 
case.

If we can hack around SCRIPT_NAME/PATH_INFO separately as per the other 
thread there's no longer any need for anything but ASCII, so WSGI's 
strings can be bytes or unicode depending on your taste/Python-version, 
without it hurting anyone. The important job of mapping

* query parameters,
* POSTed request bodies, and
* response bodies

between bytes and unicode remains firmly in the application/framework's 
area of concern and needs no assistance from WSGI.

-- 
And Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/