hi, i have popped in on this thread before to mention my own extension to Network.HTTP (http://www.b7j0c.org/content/haskell-http.html, providing get() and head()). i would like to thank bjorn for his work on Network.HTTP and echo his observation that this package needs some work and active maintainence. i would also suggest that people needing http functionality extend his package instead of writing their own or providing quick and dirty hacks that cover 80% of the problem space, as i think others have discussed. http is a simple protocol, but it is not trivial, and reference implementations need to address the standard as completely as possible. no one is going to take haskell seriously as a practical tool if the libraries don't address the corner cases, and http has some. reading through the Network.HTTP code, it does appear that the original authors and present maintainers are concerned with standards conformance, which means reading the standard. http is becoming as integral to the development environment as file access. haskell needs an authoritative native implementation or a ffi wrapper to libcurl. developers also need to know that there is *one* reference library for http support (like perl's LWP)...likewise i think the lack of a single reference library for sql/db access is also hurting haskell adoption. perl wins here again with DBI. p.s. i would gladly volunteer to maintain the http package if i thought my haskell was "export quality". it isn't. thanks brad