There is a growing number of modules available for writing WWW tools.
The previous release already sported modules gopherlib,
ftplib, httplib and urllib (which unifies the
other three) for accessing data through the commonest WWW protocols.
This release also provides cgi, to ease the writing of
server-side scripts that use the Common Gateway Interface protocol,
supported by most WWW servers. The module urlparse provides
precise parsing of a URL string into its components (address scheme,
network location, path, parameters, query, and fragment identifier).
A rudimentary, parser for HTML files is available in the module
htmllib. It currently supports a subset of HTML 1.0 (if you
bring it up to date, I'd love to receive your fixes!). Unfortunately
Python seems to be too slow for real-time parsing and formatting of
HTML such as required by interactive WWW browsers --- but it's good
enough to write a ``robot'' (an automated WWW browser that searches
the web for information).