Graham, Thanks for your comments.  Fortunately, if the new charset parameter is not supplied, no mucking with stdout or stderr is done, which is the only reason I cannot argue strongly against the feature, which I would have implemented as a separate API... it doesn't get in the way if you don't use it.

I would be happy to see the argv code removed, but it has been there longer than I have been a Python user, so I just live with it ... and don't pass arguments to my CGI scripts anyway.  I've assumed that is some sort of a debug feature, but I also saw some code in the HTTPCGIServer and http.server that apparently, on some platforms, actually do pass parameters to CGI on the command lines.  I would be happy to see that code removed too, but it also predates my Python experience.  And no signs of "if debug:" by either of them!