The Web Special Interest Group for Python has disappointed me lately. Their job is to improve the Python standard library to make it more suitable for web-related development, but sadly the only people who are doing anything seem to be entirely biased towards their own preconceptions of what 'web development' means and are more interested in helping each other than in helping the language as a whole.

Basically, the current proposal seeks to develop some sort of standard that allows current web frameworks to be portable across different web servers (typically IIS, Apache, and native Python ones). They've made it quite clear that they're not interested in the needs of anyone who's not developing a framework and that the rest of us should just pick a framework that we like and hope it gets ported to their proposed standard soon, so that we are blessed with the ability to run it on any platform. (As if there were a lot of web platforms already.)

They've also made it quite clear that they idolise the Java Servlet model of web development, which itself is an order of magnitude more complex than ASP or PHP. Yet they've also made it quite clear that they're unwilling to implement standardised support for sessions, handling form data, query strings, and so on. In other words, they're seeking to bring all the complexity of Java Servlets into Python with none of the (few) benefits of the servlet libraries. Wonderful.

There was a lot of talk of politics, and I quote; "But, how will you obtain the endorsement of the Web-SIG? Keep in mind that a lot of the people actually doing any work on the Web-SIG are authors of existing frameworks, which means to get buy-in you have to support their goals." In other words, they didn't care if my suggestions would help the language or the wider community - they wouldn't be likely to back anything that didn't help them directly, and since developing web frameworks for Python was something pretty much everyone there had already done, making things simpler was of no interest to them.

There are various arguments for expecting the complex servlet-style development. Some say it has higher performance than the ASP/PHP model. Others will say that the class/object model is more maintainable than the script-per-page model. But I can't help thinking that the Python community is missing out here. ASP is predominantly a Microsoft technology and PHP is an ugly C/Perl hybrid. Python fits neatly into that gap - as readable as VB/VBScript, as open and free as PHP. It could be the next big thing for web development, but I don't think the community will let it.