[kevingessner]

If you're looking for a "clean break", Google's httplib2 [1] might be what you want. It's somewhat lower-level than Requests, but adds a bunch of advanced stuff like caching support and keep-alives. As you might guess from the name, httplib2 is more like httplib, while Requests appears to be more like urllib2.

1: http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/

[acdha]

httplib2 is part of why you should use requests: it's far more respectable as a client but not as well documented and it still takes way too much code for basic operations. I appreciate what httplib2 is trying to do, that there's a ton of hard low-level annoyances in building a modern HTTP client, but really, just use requests instead. Kenneth Reitz is very motivated and he gets the degree to which simple things should be simple whereas httplib2 feels more like an academic exercise than something people should use to build production systems[1].

Disclosure: I'm listed in the requests AUTHORS file but can claim credit for, oh, about 0.0001% of the awesomeness.

1. http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/issues/detail?id=96 is a good example: an annoying bug which affect many people, there was a fix available for months, which worked great when I applied it in a fork and pounded a couple TB of data through it, but it took over a year to make it into trunk and even longer to make it onto PyPI where any other project which required "httplib2" would get the working version.

[kenneth_reitz]

It should be noted that httpbib2 is not a Google project. A lot of people prefer it though.