I've fallen off the pace on this thread so this is a composite reply, mainly to Bjorn, Brad and Yitzchak... I would also like to express my gratitude for the work that Bjorn, and all the others involved, have done on the http library. I certainly appreciated having it available for use. I agree that a full-featured HTTP library is important for Haskell. And resource loading and serving as separate concerns on top of this. The HTTP protocol is reasonably straight forward, and pretty well specified, so standards compliance should be achievable. But to actually be useful in a lot of situations standards compliance is insufficient, many HTTP applications seem to be pretty poor efforts at compliance and being able to handle quirks is a necessity. I think any library also needs to be robust in the face of malicious input. One of the things that makes HTTP useful is that it is extendable. Any library should expose this in a principled manner. A wrapper around, say, cURL or a binding to libcurl is not a great solution in my opinion. It would be cheap and provides more functionality than the current Haskell http library but lacks the separation of protocol and processing and lacks the extension aspects of HTTP. And obviously it has foreign dependencies. So I'd really like to see a pure Haskell option. Unfortunately I don't agree that we are close to one now. I'm not enthused about http being the basis for 'the feature-complete' library. I'd like a library that at least has more static checks, is open to extension according to the protocol, allows subversion of standards compliance for case by case quirk handling and can be tuned to handle malicious input. I would also like to contribute, and could enumerate my (half-baked) ideas and opinions if they are of interest. Cheers Daniel