<p>I'm a little confused about how the standard library will behave now that Python (from 3.0) is unicode-based. Will modules such as CGI and urllib use unicode strings or will they use the new 'bytes' type and just provide encoded data?</p>

Logically a lot of things like MIME-encoded mail messages, URLs, XML documents, and so on should be returned as
```
bytes
```
not strings. This could cause some consternation as the libraries start to be nailed down for Python 3 and people discover that they have to be more aware of the
```
bytes
```
/
```
string
```
conversions than they were for
```
str
```
/
```
unicode
```
...