Saw this on FoRK <http://www.xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork/> :

At 4:19 PM -0700 7/11/01, Dave Winer wrote:
>I just got a note from Eric Raymond saying that the Python community [1] has
>decided to bake XML-RPC into its standard distribution. He said:
>
>"Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib was checked into the CVS tree for Python 2.2 this
>morning after about the fastest and most unanimous endorsement I have ever
>seen on python-dev.  I am writing the library documentation even as we
>speak."
>
>As often is the case Python leads the way. This is a major milestone for
>XML-RPC. It's also very important to emphasize [2] that any scripting
>environment can be competitive with Microsoft .NET simply by taking this
>step. There are already 37 implementations [3] of XML-RPC covering most
>programming and scripting environments and operating systems. I would also
>like to see SOAP 1.1 broadly supported in non-Microsoft environments. When
>support is built into an environment, developers can assume it's there, and
>will more likely use it in their applications.
>
>Now which environment will be next?
>
>(I'd love to see Sun take this step with Java.)
>
>Dave
>
>[1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2001-July/015825.html
>[2] http://davenet.userland.com/2001/07/09/miguelDeIcaza
>[3] http://www.xmlrpc.com/directory/1568/implementations

Although this applies directly to XML-RPC and not just XML, I think 
it does show what Python's goals are, which is (and has been) to 
enable most types of common protocol support directly 
"out-of-the-box", which is where Python get's it's tagline "batteries 
included".


-- 
Dan Moniz <dnm / pobox.com> [http://www.pobox.com/~dnm/]