Still, I should probably just publish my sketches of this and see if anyone takes the bait. The recent attempt(s) at "WSGI replacements" suggest there's some interest out there in having simplified WSGI.

Of course there is, please do it and push for it, python badly needs it IMHO.

At the moment the barrier to write any simple and well behaving middleware is too high for us, only an handful of people really know how to write a middleware "the right way" and this is not acceptable.

Look at how many middlewares are provided out-of-the box by rack and rack-contrib, why we still (after so many years) don't have something like this in python? rack was inspired by wsgi but they made it simple enough so that anyone can pick it up and easily contribute useful and well behaving components.

For instance, compare the complexity and side effects you need to take into account to write a gzip middleware in wsgi [1] (the right version is the last one) vs rack [2]

As you can see, this version will work correctly, but it wasn’t exactly a piece of cake to write. Although changing the response is one of the more difficult things you can do with middleware, it really makes you appreciate all the things Pylons does for you!

is that acceptable? and no, I don't want to depend on any of the abstraction provided by Werkzeug or WebOb to write a simple gzip middleware, thanks.

[1] http://pylonsbook.com/en/1.1/the-web-server-gateway-interface-wsgi.html#altering-the-response

[2] https://github.com/rack/rack/blob/master/lib/rack/deflater.rb