[rtpg]

But isn't requests built off of urllib?

The thing I like about python is it gives tools for library writers to build things without going too low level.

Application writers will always write with better libs, but don't have to worry about third party lib compatiblity on platforms because of the stdlib serving as a virtual machine (most of the time)

[BAKfr]

requests is built on urllib3, and it includes its own version of urllib3 (to avoid dependency problems).

If I'm not mistaken, the stdlib contains urllib and urlib2, but not urllib3.

The fact that there 3 "urllib" packages show that the Python way is not so good.