Option 1 is impossible, because the CGI script sometimes has no control on the stream : for instance on a shared web host, it will receive sys.stdin as a text stream

I also vote for option 3 ; explaining that if no argument is passed, the program will use sys.stdin.buffer (or the result of sys.stdin.detach() : I guess it's the same ?), and that if an argument is passed, it must provide an attribute "buffer" (or a method detach() ?) as the binary layer of the stream

BTW, I didn't have time to finish the versions of cgi.py and tests, my next slot is this week-end