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The purpose is to encapsulate all URL handling functions in one module.
At the moment there are three modules that dissect URLs for various bits
of information. These are urlparse - to split url into components,
urllib - to decode splitted data and cgi - to parse query component.
To outline the API of the proposed module I'll start with urlparse :
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-urlparse.html
1. There are two identical functions - urlparse and urlsplit that make
the same parsing operation, but vary in format of return arguments. They
could be replaced with one - let's call it urlsplitex - that returns
result in a class with attributes - not a subclass of list, but rather
dictionary subclass, because positional arguments are evil and you
always have to look into reference to find out the correct order if you
read or debug the code.
2. Returned class should not be immutable. It must be possible to modify
the results to unset extra parts (like fragments) or edit required parts
as needed and get the target URL via urlunsplitex or embedded method of
the same class. Thus arguments "default_scheme" and "allow_fragments"
will be useless as well as function urldefrag.
3. urlparsex, a replacement for "parsing" function of the new library
should be high-level functions to dissect url information into tree-like
structure with atomic leafs. This includes decoding url entities and
splitting parameters into child structures. The proposed structure of
url class attributes is:
scheme string
netloc class
 username string
 password string
 server string
 port integer
path list with objects of class
 part string
 param list with objects of class
 name string
 value string
query list with objects of class
 name string
 value string
fragment string
4. urlunparsex will be provided to reassemble class back into URL. This
will deprecate series of functions from urllib like quote, unquote,
urlencode and also functions parse_qs and parse_qsl from cgi module.
References:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/patches/2005-February/016972.html
http://bugs.python.org/issue1722348
http://bugs.python.org/issue1462525 

You missed urllib2 I think. :-)
I agree it's a mess. I'm sure it all started out with backwards
compatibility in mind. I find myself often importing cgi only to use
the tiny function escape() that is defined there...
I wonder if web-sig wouldn't be a good place to get some kindred spirits
together to redesign these APIs for Py3k?

I have started this work at
http://svn.python.org/projects/sandbox/trunk/urilib/
as a part of G-SoC, yes taking it to web-sig would be appropriate and I
shall do so. techtonik, you might want to review it urilib and we can
discuss it further.
Thanks,

Please contact Brett Cannon. He organized the stdlib cleanup.

Yes, the modules should probably all get merged somehow. But discussing
it in the web-sig is fine with me and I am happy to look at what the
web-sig ends up recommending.

Brett, in consideration of PEP 3108... shouldn't we close this issue?
The urilib module in the sandbox wasn't updated in the last seven months.
Or we just keep this open as a reminder? (of what?)
Thanks!

While the work is appreciated, PEP 3108 is taking this in a different 
direction.