[Web-SIG] PEP 444 (aka Web3)

[Chris McDonough]

On Fri, 2010-09-17 at 19:47 +0300, Ionel Maries Cristian wrote:
> I don't like this proposal at all. Besides having to go through the
> bytes craziness the design is pretty backwards for middleware and
> asynchronous applications.

We've acknowledged in other messages to this thread that the web3.async
red herring is speculative, and Armin has indicated that if he does not
find a champion willing to create a reference implementation for it
today that it will be taken out.  This doesn't help async people, but it
also doesn't harm them (no difference from WSGI really).  Personally, I
hope nobody steps up and we just rip it out. ;-)

I'm not sure why you characterize using bytes as "bytes craziness".  We
have been using strings as byte sequences in WSGI for over five years.
Python itself draws an equivalence between the Python 3 bytes type and
Python 2 "str" ("bytes" is aliased to "str" under Python 2).  I'm not
really sure why we shouldn't take advantage of that equivalence, and why
people are so enamored of treating envvar values, headers, and such as
text other than the brokenness of the Python 3 stdlib urllib stuff.  

IMO, WSGI/Web3 isn't really a programming platform (or at least if it
is, it is destined to be a pretty crappy one), it's just a connection
protocol, so any "its more typing" or "its ugly" argument seems pretty
thin to me.  I'd personally rather have it be more general and less easy
to use than potentially broken in some corner case circumstance.

- C